The Artist Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: An Orgy of Thick Paint from the Painter Who Shocked NYC

Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. This inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her material, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – earning her acclaim as a leading figurative artists of her era – is all about texture, application, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, real high-level aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. In one depicts a collection of forms trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their path. A different work features a person given a large disguise in some bizarre initiation ritual before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy 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 Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a man in green sit back in gilded seats – while in other works a couple console each other in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, desolate and helpless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, covered in references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to interpretation. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of a historical figure, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. A protester picketed the work daily, and others demanded it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of African-American suffering was the major headline of the event. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a society more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get upset at this emotional, mournful painting.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But all her subsequent work since exists in its shadow. She unavoidably came out of that ordeal a transformed creator. 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.