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Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant tribute of her medium, but significant themes 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, hue and substance. This is art for artists, real high-level aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy losing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. One piece shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. A different work presents a figure receiving a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual in front of a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy 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 turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, rather than the crowds that follow them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – while in additional pieces a couple console each other in a landscape strewn with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests naked, desolate and helpless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with references. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). You could spend hours identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the works.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic invites to interpretation. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are two relatively clear narratives: the people in power, and the crowds that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist demonstrated against the work each day, and some called for it to be removed. An artist of European descent depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the event. It was the peak of the late 2010s social conflicts, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But all her subsequent work since exists in its shadow. She inevitably came out of that experience a changed artist. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political art at the top tier.