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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This first proper London exhibition is a messy, exuberant celebration of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through 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 generation – is all about texture, application, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s plenty to keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that truly drives the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. In one depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of trash in their path. A different work presents a figure receiving a large disguise in an odd initiation ritual in front of a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as commentary on America’s condition, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the crowds that follow them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a pair console each other in a scene strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, forlorn and helpless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, filled with allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure 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 littered the artworks.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about that. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of a historical figure, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. A protester demonstrated against the painting daily, and some called for it to be removed. A white artist painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of African-American suffering was the major headline of the biennial. It was the peak of the recent culture wars, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her career, and the artist likely aims to progress. But everything she’s done now exists in its influence. She inevitably emerged of that experience a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.