The Artist Dana Schutz Review: A Feast of Gloop from the Painter Who Outraged NYC

Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her first proper London show is a messy, exuberant celebration of her material, but some big messages are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading figurative artists of her generation – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to keep you going for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the initial room are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. One piece depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their wake. A different work features a person receiving a huge mask in an odd ceremony before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on how society is divided and furious, and crowd psychology is transforming all to waste.

An Embrace by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, rather than the crowds that support them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – while in other works a pair console each other in a landscape strewn with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, forlorn and helpless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, covered in allusions. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, countless nods to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). You could spend hours identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to interpretation. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct themes: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about that. In 2017, her painting a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist picketed the painting each day, and others called for it to be removed. A white artist painting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the biennial. It was the peak of the late 2010s 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 angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But all her subsequent work now exists in its shadow. She inevitably came out of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the top tier.