The Artist Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: A Feast of Thick Paint from the Painter Who Shocked NYC

Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in thick gobs of gooey paint. Her inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her material, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her generation – is focused on surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that truly drives the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. In one depicts a group of figures stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their path. A different work presents a person receiving a large disguise in an odd ceremony in front of a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and mob mentality is transforming all to rubbish.

The Kiss by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – while in other works a couple comfort one another in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, rests naked, forlorn and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, covered in references. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, countless nods to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the artworks.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic invites to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the meaning of a Titian but, for my money, there are two relatively clear narratives: the people in power, and the public that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about that. Back in 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist picketed the work daily, and others demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the event. This marked the height of the recent social conflicts, a time that saw people turning on each other 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.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done now exists in its influence. She unavoidably came out of that ordeal a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.