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Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her first proper London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her medium, but some big messages are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading painters of her generation – is focused on surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. This is art for artists, real high-level art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s plenty to engage you for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. One piece shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their wake. A different work features a figure receiving a large disguise in some bizarre initiation ritual in front of a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and crowd psychology is transforming all to rubbish.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the crowds that follow them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – while in other works a couple comfort one another in a scene strewn with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, rests naked, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with allusions. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, numerous references to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a portrait of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the works.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic invites to analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist demonstrated against the painting daily, and some demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of black pain was the biggest story of the biennial. It was the peak of the recent social conflicts, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, simplified and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and the artist likely aims to move on. But all her subsequent work now exists in its shadow. She unavoidably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.