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Dana Schutz smothers her paintings in thick gobs of gooey paint. This first proper London exhibition is a messy, exuberant tribute of her material, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – which has seen her lauded as a leading painters of her era – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to keep you going for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. One piece depicts a group of figures trudges mindlessly towards something off canvas, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of trash in their path. In another presents a figure given a huge mask in an odd ceremony before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as political, as commentary on the state of the US, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man sit back in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a pair console each other in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, forlorn and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain that one painting is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the works.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic invites to interpretation. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her painting a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist picketed the painting each day, and others called for it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of black pain was the biggest story of the event. This marked the height of the late 2010s social conflicts, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a society more divided, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. She unavoidably came out of that ordeal a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.