🔗 Share this article Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: A Feast of Thick Paint from the Artist Who Shocked New York The American painter smothers her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them. The Artist's Technique Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important painters of her era – is all about texture, application, hue and substance. This is art for artists, real high-level aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick. Initial Exhibition Pieces These pieces in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something off canvas, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. A different work presents a figure receiving a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony in front of a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to interpret these as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on how society is divided and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish. An Embrace by the artist. Shift in Focus In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the crowds that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – whereas in other works a pair console each other in a scene filled with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, forlorn and helpless in a bed. Influences and Allusions This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in references. There’s 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 a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of a cartoon character from an animated series). You could spend hours spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the works. A Model by Dana Schutz. Meaning and Stories Art this complex, complex and allegorical invites to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the symbolism of a Titian but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct themes: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke. The 2017 Scandal And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her painting a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, 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 shown at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. An activist demonstrated against the painting each day, and others demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the biennial. This marked the height of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, simplified and angrier 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 all her subsequent work now exists in its influence. She unavoidably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political art at the highest level.