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Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. This first proper London exhibition is a messy, exuberant tribute of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her era – is all about texture, application, hue and substance. This is art for artists, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. In one shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, waving hands and leaving a trail of debris in their wake. In another presents a person given a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to interpret these as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the crowds that follow them. Mysterious forms 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 additional pieces a pair console each other in a scene filled with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, rests naked, desolate and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with allusions. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). It would take time spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. 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. Back in 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched 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 profiting from tragedy for her own gain. An activist picketed the work daily, and some demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the major headline of the event. This marked the height of the late 2010s social conflicts, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a world more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her professional life, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. She inevitably came out of that experience a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical art at the top tier.