🔗 Share this article The Artist Dana Schutz Review: An Orgy of Thick Paint from the Painter Who Outraged New York Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in thick gobs of gooey paint. This inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration 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 figurative artists of her era – is focused on surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. This is art for artists, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you for a while. 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 enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their wake. In another presents a figure receiving a huge mask in an odd initiation ritual before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to interpret these as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on how society is divided and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish. The Kiss by Dana Schutz. Shift in Focus In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a man in green recline in golden chairs – while in other works a pair console each other in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, rests naked, forlorn and powerless in bed. Influences and Allusions This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, covered in allusions. You’ll find 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 a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the history of painting, countless nods to pop culture (It seems certain that one painting is a depiction of a cartoon character from an animated series). You could spend hours identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the works. The Example by the exhibitor. Interpretation and Narratives Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic invites to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Titian but, for my money, there are two relatively clear themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they provoke. The 2017 Scandal And the artist understands about that. Back in 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse 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 profiting from tragedy for her own gain. A protester demonstrated against the painting daily, and some demanded it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent painting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the biennial. This marked the height of the late 2010s culture wars, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork. Legacy and Current Work This might have ended her professional life, and the artist likely aims to progress. But everything she’s done since exists in its shadow. She unavoidably came out of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the top tier.