The Artist Dana Schutz Review: An Orgy of Gloop from the Painter Who Outraged NYC

The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. This first proper London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading figurative artists of her generation – is all about texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one depicts a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of debris in their wake. In another presents a person receiving a huge mask in an odd ceremony in front of a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the people in power, rather than the crowds 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 – while in other works a couple console each other in a landscape filled with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies unclothed, desolate and powerless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain that one painting is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical invites to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Titian but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the people in power, and the public that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about that. Back in 2017, her painting Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American who was lynched by two white men in a southern state in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her own gain. A protester picketed the painting each day, and others demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the biennial. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a society more divided, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done now exists in its influence. She unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical painting at the highest level.