Dana Schutz Review: A Feast of Thick Paint from the Painter Who Outraged New York

Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant tribute of her material, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s plenty to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. In one shows a group of figures stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their wake. A different work features a figure receiving a huge mask in an odd initiation ritual in front of a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to interpret these as political, as commentary on America’s condition, on how society is divided and furious, and crowd psychology is transforming all to rubbish.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, rather than the crowds that support them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – while in other works a couple comfort one another in a landscape filled with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, rests unclothed, forlorn and powerless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, countless nods 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 spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the artworks.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about that. Back in 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist demonstrated against the painting each day, and some demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the event. It was the peak of the late 2010s social conflicts, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a society more divided, simplified and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get upset at this emotional, mournful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done now exists in its influence. She inevitably came out of that experience a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.