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

Dana Schutz smothers her paintings in thick gobs of gooey paint. This inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant tribute of her medium, but some big messages are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as one of the most important painters of her generation – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s enough here to keep you going for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the initial room are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. One piece shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of trash in their path. A different work features a figure receiving a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as political, as observation on the state of the US, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, rather than the masses that support them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a man in green sit back in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a pair console each other in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, lies unclothed, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, covered in allusions. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the works.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to interpretation. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are two relatively clear narratives: the people in power, and the crowds that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about that. Back in 2017, her painting a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by two white men in a southern state in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. A protester picketed the painting each day, and others called for it to be removed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of black pain was the major headline of the biennial. This marked the height of the recent social conflicts, a time 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 seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her career, and the artist likely aims to progress. But all her subsequent work now exists in its shadow. She inevitably came out of that ordeal a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.