🔗 Share this article The Artist Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: A Feast of Gloop from the Painter Who Outraged New York Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant tribute of her material, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them. The Artist's Technique Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as one of the most important painters of her generation – is all about texture, application, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, real high-level aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. 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 populated by enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. In one shows a group of figures trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of debris in their wake. A different work presents a figure given a large disguise in an odd initiation ritual before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to read any of this as political, as observation on the state of the US, on societal splits and angry, and mob mentality is transforming all to waste. An Embrace by Dana Schutz. Shift in Focus In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, rather than the crowds that support them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – while in other works a couple console each other in a landscape strewn with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies unclothed, desolate and powerless in bed. Influences and Allusions This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with allusions. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the artworks. A Model by Dana Schutz. Interpretation and Narratives Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. I feel as if one is tested on the meaning of a Titian but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct themes: the ruling class, and the crowds that they bait. Controversy and Impact And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her painting a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of a historical figure, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist demonstrated against the work each day, and some demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the biennial. This marked the height of the recent culture wars, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a society increasingly polarized, simplified and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork. Legacy and Current Work It could have ruined her career, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But everything she’s done now exists in its influence. She unavoidably emerged of that experience a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.