Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: A Feast of Gloop from the Painter Who Shocked New York

Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in thick gobs of gooey paint. Her first proper London exhibition is a messy, exuberant celebration of her medium, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – earning her acclaim as a leading figurative artists of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in coats of color 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.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. One piece depicts a collection of forms trudges mindlessly towards something off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their path. A different work features a figure receiving a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual in front of a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as social commentary, as observation on the state of the US, on how society is divided and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste.

The Kiss by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds that support them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a man in green recline in gilded seats – while in other works a pair console each other in a scene strewn with corpses, and a woman, perhaps the artist, lies naked, forlorn and powerless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, numerous references to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a portrait of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the works.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the people in power, and the public that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about that. Back in 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in a southern state in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. An activist demonstrated against the work each day, and some called for it to be removed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the biennial. This marked the height of the recent culture wars, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world more divided, 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 all her subsequent work since exists in its influence. She unavoidably came out of that experience a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.