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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in thick gobs of gooey paint. Her inaugural London show 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

Her method – which has seen her lauded as a leading figurative artists of her era – is focused on surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, real high-level aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s plenty to keep you going for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the initial room are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. In one shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their wake. In another features a person given a large disguise in some bizarre initiation ritual before a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is transforming all to rubbish.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the crowds that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green sit back in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a pair comfort one another in a landscape filled with corpses, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, rests naked, forlorn and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with allusions. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the history of painting, numerous references to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a portrait of a cartoon character from an animated series). It would take time spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, complex and allegorical invites to interpretation. It seems like one is tested on the meaning of a Titian but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the ruling class, and the public that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about that. Back in 2017, her painting Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was murdered by two white men in a southern state in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. An activist demonstrated against the work daily, and some called for it to be removed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the biggest story of the event. It was the peak of the recent social conflicts, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and the artist likely aims to progress. But everything she’s done now exists in its influence. She inevitably emerged of that experience a transformed creator. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.