🔗 Share this article The Artist Dana Schutz Review: A Feast of Gloop from the Painter Who Outraged New York Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in thick gobs of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them. Schutz's Approach Her method – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important figurative artists of her era – is all about surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick. Works in the First Gallery These pieces in the initial room are full of giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. In one depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. In another presents a figure receiving a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony in front of a horde of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as political, as observation on America’s condition, on how society is divided and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste. An Embrace by Dana Schutz. Shift in Focus In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the crowds that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a pair console each other in a scene strewn with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies unclothed, desolate and helpless in a bed. Influences and Allusions This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with references. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the history of painting, numerous references to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the works. The Example by Dana Schutz. Interpretation and Narratives Art this complex, intricate and symbolic invites to interpretation. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Titian but, for my money, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the crowds that they provoke. Controversy and Impact And Schutz should know about that. Back in 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her own gain. An activist demonstrated against the painting daily, and others demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the event. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, simplified and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting. Legacy and Current Work This might have ended her professional life, and the artist likely aims to move on. But all her subsequent work since exists in its influence. She inevitably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.