The Artist Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: A Feast of Thick Paint from the Painter Who Outraged NYC

The American painter smothers her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her first proper London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her material, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading figurative artists of her era – is focused on texture, application, 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 plenty to keep you going for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that really makes the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the initial room are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. One piece depicts a group of figures trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of debris in their path. In another features a person given a large disguise in some bizarre initiation ritual before a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and mob mentality is transforming all to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green recline in golden chairs – while in additional pieces a couple comfort one another in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a woman, perhaps the artist, lies naked, forlorn and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, filled with references. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain that one painting is a depiction of a cartoon character from an animated series). It would take time identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the works.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the ruling class, and the crowds that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a black teenager who was murdered by two white men in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the work daily, and some called for it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the biggest story of the biennial. This marked the height of the late 2010s culture wars, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her professional life, and the artist likely aims to progress. But all her subsequent work since exists in its shadow. She unavoidably emerged of that experience a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political art at the highest level.