🔗 Share this article The Artist Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: An Orgy of Thick Paint from the Artist Who Outraged NYC The American painter cakes her canvases in thick gobs of gooey paint. This inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her medium, but some big messages are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them. Schutz's Approach Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading painters of her generation – 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 layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick. Works in the First Gallery The works in the initial room are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. In one shows a group of figures stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their wake. A different work features a figure receiving a large disguise in an odd ceremony before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to read any of this as political, as commentary on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste. The Kiss by the artist. Shift in Focus In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the crowds that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a green-clad man sit back in golden chairs – while in additional pieces a pair comfort one another in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, lies unclothed, forlorn and powerless in bed. Influences and Allusions This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in references. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (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 works. The Example by Dana Schutz. Interpretation and Narratives Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic invites to interpretation. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the people in power, and the public that they provoke. The 2017 Scandal And Schutz should know about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. An activist picketed the painting daily, and others demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent painting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the event. This marked the height of the recent social conflicts, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, simplified and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful painting. Aftermath and Recent Art It could have ruined her professional life, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She inevitably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political art at the highest level.