Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: An Orgy of Gloop from the Artist Who Shocked New York

The American painter smothers her paintings in thick gobs of gooey paint. Her first proper London show is a messy, exuberant tribute 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 a leading painters of her era – is focused on texture, application, hue and substance. This is art for artists, real high-level aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the initial room are full of giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. In one shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of debris in their path. A different work features a figure receiving a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony in front of a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to interpret these 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 waste.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds that follow them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a green-clad man sit back in gilded seats – whereas in other works a pair console each other in a scene strewn with corpses, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests unclothed, forlorn and powerless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a depiction of a cartoon character from an animated series). 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, complex and allegorical invites to analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the meaning 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 Schutz should know about that. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was lynched by two white men in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. An activist demonstrated against the painting each day, and some called for it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of African-American suffering was the major headline of the event. This marked the height of the recent culture wars, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, 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 heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and the artist likely aims to move on. But all her subsequent work since exists in its shadow. She inevitably came out of that ordeal a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical art at the top tier.