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Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This first proper London exhibition is a messy, exuberant celebration of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – which has seen her lauded as a leading figurative artists of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. This is art for artists, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, 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.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their path. In another presents a figure given a huge mask in an odd initiation ritual in front of a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on how society is divided and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, rather than the crowds that follow them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in golden chairs – whereas in other works a pair comfort one another in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies naked, desolate and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, numerous references to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to interpretation. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Titian but, for my money, there are two relatively clear narratives: the people in power, and the public that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by two white men in Mississippi in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her own gain. An activist picketed the work daily, and others demanded it to be removed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the event. This marked the height of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, simplified and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But all her subsequent work since exists in its influence. She unavoidably emerged of that experience a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political art at the top tier.