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The American painter cakes her paintings in thick gobs of gooey paint. Her inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – earning her acclaim as a leading figurative artists of her era – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s plenty to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. One piece shows a group of figures stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their path. A different work presents a person receiving a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the crowds that support them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a green-clad man recline in golden chairs – while in additional pieces a couple comfort one another in a scene filled with dead bodies, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, forlorn and helpless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in allusions. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). It would take time spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Titian but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the crowds that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in 1955 – 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 picketed the painting each day, and others called for it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the biennial. It was the peak of the late 2010s social conflicts, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a world increasingly polarized, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. She unavoidably emerged of that experience a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political art at the top tier.