🔗 Share this article Dana Schutz Review: A Feast of Gloop from the Painter Who Outraged NYC The American painter cakes her canvases in thick gobs of viscous pigment. This inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant tribute of her material, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them. Schutz's Approach Her method – which has seen her lauded as a leading figurative artists of her era – is all about surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, real high-level aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy losing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s plenty to keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the artworks resonate. Initial Exhibition Pieces The works in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. One piece depicts a group of figures stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their wake. A different work features a person given a large disguise in an odd ceremony before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to read any of this as political, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is transforming all to rubbish. The Kiss by the artist. Changing Themes In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a green-clad man sit back in gilded seats – while in other works a pair console each other in a scene filled with dead bodies, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, rests unclothed, desolate and powerless in 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 Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, countless nods to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the works. A Model by the exhibitor. Meaning and Stories Art this complex, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to interpretation. I feel as if one is tested on the symbolism of a Titian but, for my money, there are two relatively clear narratives: the people in power, and the public that they bait. Controversy and Impact And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the body of a historical figure, a young African-American who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. An activist demonstrated against the work daily, and others demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of black pain was the biggest story of the event. This marked the height of the late 2010s social conflicts, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a world more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting. Legacy and Current Work It could have ruined her career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done since exists in its shadow. She inevitably emerged of that experience a transformed creator. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the top tier.