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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in thick gobs of gooey paint. Her first proper London exhibition 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 era – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the initial room are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one depicts a group of figures stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of debris in their path. A different work presents a figure given a large disguise in an odd initiation ritual before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as observation on America’s condition, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the people in power, instead of the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green sit back in gilded seats – whereas in other works a pair comfort one another in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, forlorn and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, covered in allusions. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the history of painting, numerous references to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure 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 Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, complex and allegorical invites to analysis. I feel as if one is tested on the meaning of a Titian but, in my view, there are two relatively clear narratives: the people in power, and the crowds that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about that. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American who was lynched by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. An activist demonstrated against the work daily, and some demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of African-American suffering was the major headline of the biennial. This marked the height of the late 2010s culture wars, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined 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 ordeal a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.