Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This first proper London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.
Schutz's Approach
Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim 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 coats of color and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.
Works in the First Gallery
These pieces in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece depicts a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their path. In another presents a person given a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to read any of this as political, as commentary on America’s condition, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is transforming all to waste.
An Embrace by the artist.
Changing Themes
In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the people in power, rather than the crowds that support them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a man in green recline in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a pair console each other in a landscape filled with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies unclothed, desolate and powerless in a bed.
Influences and Allusions
This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in references. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a depiction of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the works.
A Model by Dana Schutz.
Interpretation and Narratives
Art this complex, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the public that they bait.
Controversy and Impact
And Schutz should know about that. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. A protester picketed the painting each day, and some demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the major headline of the biennial. This marked the height of the late 2010s social conflicts, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a society more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get angry at this emotional, mournful painting.
Aftermath and Recent Art
This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its shadow. She inevitably emerged of that experience a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political painting at the top tier.
