Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: A Feast of Gloop from the Artist Who Outraged NYC

The American painter cakes her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. This inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant celebration of her material, but significant themes are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – earning her acclaim as one of the most important figurative artists of her era – is all about surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that really makes the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. One piece shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, waving hands and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. In another presents a figure receiving a huge mask in an odd initiation ritual before a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as social commentary, as commentary on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, rather than the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green recline in golden chairs – whereas in other works a pair comfort one another in a landscape strewn with corpses, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests naked, desolate and helpless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain that one painting is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic invites to analysis. I feel as if one is tested on the meaning of a Titian but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the ruling class, and the crowds that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by two white men in a southern state in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. A protester picketed the painting each day, and some called for it to be removed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of African-American suffering was the major headline of the biennial. This marked the height of the recent social conflicts, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a world increasingly polarized, simplified and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her professional life, and the artist likely aims to move on. But all her subsequent work now exists in its influence. She inevitably emerged of that ordeal a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.