Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: An Orgy of Thick Paint from the Painter Who Shocked New York

Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in thick gobs of gooey paint. Her first proper London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her material, but some big messages are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important painters of her era – is focused on surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, real high-level art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their path. In another presents a person receiving a huge mask in an odd initiation ritual 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 societal splits and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

The Kiss by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, rather than the masses that support them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – whereas in other works a couple console each other in a scene strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies unclothed, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the history of painting, numerous references to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the works.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical invites to interpretation. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the people in power, and the public that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by two white men in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. A protester picketed the work each day, and some called for it to be removed. An artist of European descent depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of African-American suffering was the major headline of the event. 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 identical team. In retrospect, in a society more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get upset at this emotional, mournful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her career, and the artist likely aims to move on. But all her subsequent work now exists in its influence. She unavoidably came out of that experience a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.