Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: An Orgy of Thick Paint from the Painter Who Shocked NYC

Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her first proper London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important painters of her generation – is focused on surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. In one shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and leaving a trail 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 not hard to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on how society is divided and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, rather than the crowds that follow them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a green-clad man sit back in gilded seats – whereas in other works a pair comfort one another in a scene strewn with dead bodies, and a woman, perhaps the artist, lies unclothed, desolate and helpless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with allusions. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). You could spend hours spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the works.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, complex and allegorical invites to interpretation. I feel as if one is tested on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are two relatively clear narratives: the people in power, and the crowds that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about that. In 2017, her painting a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by two white men in a southern state in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the work each day, and some demanded it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the major headline of the event. This marked the height of the recent social conflicts, a period that saw people turning on each other 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 emotional, mournful painting.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But all her subsequent work now exists in its shadow. She unavoidably came out of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.