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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her first proper London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her material, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her era – is all about texture, application, colour and materiality. 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 plenty to keep you going for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the initial room are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. One piece shows 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 given a large disguise in an odd initiation ritual before a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s not hard 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.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the crowds that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a green-clad man sit back in golden chairs – whereas in other works a pair comfort one another in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, rests naked, forlorn and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in references. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation 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, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). You could spend hours identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic invites to interpretation. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Titian but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the ruling class, and the crowds that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about that. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of a historical figure, a black teenager who was murdered by two white men in a southern state in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist picketed the painting daily, and some demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the biennial. It was the peak of the recent social conflicts, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. 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 emotional, mournful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. She inevitably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political art at the top tier.