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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. This first proper London exhibition is a messy, exuberant tribute of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading painters of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. This is art for artists, real high-level aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, 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.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the initial room are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one depicts a group of figures trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their wake. A different work features a person receiving a large disguise in an odd ceremony before a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the crowds that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a green-clad man sit back in gilded seats – while in other works a pair comfort one another in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, covered in allusions. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, numerous references to mainstream media (It seems certain that one painting is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the works.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic invites to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Titian but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, and the public that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist picketed the work daily, and some demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of black pain was the biggest story of the event. This marked the height of the recent social conflicts, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a world increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her professional life, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She unavoidably emerged of that experience a transformed creator. 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.