The Artist Dana Schutz Review: An Orgy of Thick Paint from the Artist Who Shocked NYC

The American painter cakes her paintings in thick gobs of gooey paint. This inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant celebration of her medium, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her era – is all about surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. 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 her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that really makes the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the initial room are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. One piece depicts a group of figures trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their path. In another presents a person given a huge mask in an odd initiation ritual before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on societal splits and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the masses that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak 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 corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests naked, forlorn and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, covered in allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the history of painting, countless nods to pop culture (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.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

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

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the body 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. 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. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the biggest story of the biennial. This marked the height of the recent culture wars, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a society more divided, simplified and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her professional life, and the artist likely aims to progress. But all her subsequent work since exists in its influence. She inevitably emerged of that experience a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political art at the top tier.