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Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her material, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important painters of her era – is focused on surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that really makes the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. In one shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their wake. In another presents a figure receiving a huge mask in an odd initiation ritual before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as political, as commentary on the state of the US, on societal splits and angry, and mob mentality is transforming all to waste.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to shift her focus 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 gilded seats – while in additional pieces a pair console each other in a scene strewn with corpses, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, lies unclothed, forlorn and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, covered in references. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain that one painting is a depiction of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the works.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Titian but, for my money, there are two relatively clear narratives: the people in power, and the public that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the work daily, and some demanded it to be removed. A white artist painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the event. This marked the height of the recent social conflicts, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She inevitably came out of that ordeal a changed artist. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical art at the top tier.