Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: An Orgy of Thick Paint from the Artist Who Shocked New York

The American painter cakes her canvases in thick gobs of gooey paint. Her first proper London exhibition is a messy, exuberant celebration of her material, but significant themes are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important painters of her generation – is focused on texture, application, 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 engage you for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their wake. A different work presents a figure receiving a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony in front of a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses 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 other works a couple console each other in a scene strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests naked, forlorn and powerless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, filled with allusions. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, numerous references to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the works.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to interpretation. I feel as if one is tested on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, 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. Back in 2017, her painting a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by two white men in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. An activist picketed the work each day, and others called for it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the biennial. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world more divided, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But all her subsequent work now exists in its shadow. She inevitably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the top tier.