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Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in heavy layers 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.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as a leading figurative artists of her era – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the initial room are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. In one depicts a group of figures trudges mindlessly towards something off canvas, waving hands and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. A different work presents a figure receiving a large disguise in some bizarre initiation ritual before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and mob mentality is transforming all to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, rather than the masses that follow them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a couple comfort one another in a scene filled with dead bodies, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies unclothed, forlorn and helpless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, filled with allusions. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, countless nods 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 elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the artworks.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to interpretation. I feel as if one is tested on the symbolism of a Titian but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct themes: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about that. Back in 2017, her painting a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a black teenager who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the painting daily, and others called for it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of black pain was the biggest story of the event. This marked the height of the recent culture wars, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. She inevitably emerged of that ordeal a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.