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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but some big messages are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her era – is all about texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. 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 Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. One piece shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. A different work presents a person receiving a huge mask in an odd ceremony in front of a horde of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to interpret these as social commentary, as observation on the state of the US, on how society is divided and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the masses that support them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a green-clad man sit back in gilded seats – whereas in other works a couple comfort one another in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, rests naked, desolate and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, filled with references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the history of painting, numerous references to mainstream media (It seems certain that one painting is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). You could spend hours spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

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

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her painting a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was lynched by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – 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 daily, and some demanded it to be removed. A white artist depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the major headline of the biennial. This marked the height of the recent culture wars, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world more divided, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get angry 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 unavoidably came out of that experience a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political painting at the top tier.