🔗 Share this article

Dana Schutz smothers her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant celebration of her material, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as one of the most important figurative artists of her era – is all about texture, application, hue and substance. This is art for artists, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that really makes the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the initial room are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. In one shows a group of figures stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their wake. In another features a person given a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to interpret these as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – whereas in other works a pair console each other in a landscape strewn with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, rests unclothed, forlorn and helpless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, covered in references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). You could spend hours identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the artworks.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to interpretation. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Titian but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct themes: the ruling class, and the public that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about that. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. An activist demonstrated against the work each day, and others demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the biennial. It was the peak of the recent culture wars, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her professional life, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done now exists in its influence. She unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical painting at the highest level.