Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: A Feast of Thick Paint from the Artist Who Shocked NYC

Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her first proper London exhibition is a messy, exuberant tribute of her material, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as one of the most important painters of her generation – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. One piece shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their wake. In another features a figure given a huge mask in an odd ceremony before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

The Kiss by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the people in power, instead of the masses that support them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a couple console each other in a landscape filled with corpses, and a woman, perhaps the artist, lies unclothed, forlorn and helpless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in references. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, countless nods to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). You could spend hours spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to interpretation. It seems like one is tested on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, and the public that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about that. Back in 2017, her painting a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist picketed the painting daily, and some demanded it to be removed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of African-American suffering was the major headline of the event. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a world more divided, simplified and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

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 unavoidably came out of that experience a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.