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The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant tribute of her material, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important painters of her era – is all about texture, application, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s plenty to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. In one shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their wake. A different work features a figure given a large disguise in an odd ceremony before a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s easy to read any of this as political, as commentary on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and crowd psychology is transforming all to waste.

An Embrace by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – whereas in other works a couple comfort one another in a scene filled with dead bodies, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests unclothed, desolate and helpless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, covered in references. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the works.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic invites to interpretation. I feel as if one is tested on the symbolism of a Titian but, in my view, there are two relatively clear narratives: the people in power, and the crowds that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about that. Back in 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by two white men in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the painting daily, and others called for it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the major headline of the biennial. This marked the height of the recent culture wars, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a world increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But all her subsequent work since exists in its influence. She inevitably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.