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Dana Schutz smothers her paintings in thick gobs of gooey paint. This first proper London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading painters of her generation – is focused on surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that really makes the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece depicts a collection of forms trudges mindlessly towards something off canvas, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of trash in their path. In another presents a person given a large disguise in an odd initiation ritual before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.

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 masses that follow them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a couple console each other in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests unclothed, desolate and helpless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that one painting is a depiction of a cartoon character from an animated series). You could spend hours spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was murdered by two white men in Mississippi in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. A protester demonstrated against the work daily, and others demanded it to be removed. A white artist painting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of African-American suffering was the major headline of the biennial. This marked the height of the recent social conflicts, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a society more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But everything she’s done since 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 masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the highest level.