The Artist Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: An Orgy of Gloop from the Painter Who Outraged New York

Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in thick gobs of gooey paint. Her inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important painters of her generation – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, real high-level aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to keep you going for a while. 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 populated by giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. One piece depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their path. A different work presents a person given a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual in front of a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on the state of the US, on how society is divided and furious, and crowd psychology is transforming all to rubbish.

The Kiss by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the crowds that follow them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man sit back in gilded seats – while in other works a couple console each other in a scene strewn with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, desolate and helpless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, covered in allusions. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a portrait of a cartoon character from an animated series). You could spend hours spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, 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 a couple of distinct themes: the ruling class, and the crowds that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about that. Back in 2017, her painting Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of a historical figure, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. A protester picketed the work daily, and some demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the biggest story of the event. This marked the height of the late 2010s social conflicts, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a world increasingly polarized, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her career, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She inevitably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.