🔗 Share this article

The American painter cakes her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant tribute 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 painters of her generation – is focused on surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s plenty 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 initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of debris in their path. In another presents a figure receiving a huge mask in an odd ceremony before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to interpret these as political, as observation on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the people in power, rather than the masses that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a green-clad man sit back in golden chairs – whereas in other works a pair comfort one another in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests naked, forlorn and helpless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, covered in references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, 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 art historical tradition, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain that one painting is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). It would take time spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical invites to analysis. I feel as if one is tested on the meaning of a Titian but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about that. Back in 2017, her painting a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American 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 exploiting black death for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the work daily, and some demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the major headline of the event. This marked the height of the recent social conflicts, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a society more divided, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her professional life, and the artist likely aims to move on. But all her subsequent work now exists in its shadow. She unavoidably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political art at the highest level.