Dana Schutz smothers her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. This inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.
The Artist's Technique
Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading figurative artists of her era – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s plenty to engage you for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.
Works in the First Gallery
The works 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 outside the frame, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. In another features a figure receiving a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as political, as commentary on America’s condition, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.
The Kiss by the artist.
Changing Themes
In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – while in other works a couple console each other in a scene strewn with corpses, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests naked, forlorn and helpless in bed.
Influences and Allusions
This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, covered in references. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a portrait of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the artworks.
A Model by the exhibitor.
Meaning and Stories
Art this complex, complex and allegorical invites to analysis. I feel as if one is tested on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are two relatively clear narratives: the ruling class, and the public that they bait.
The 2017 Scandal
And the artist understands about that. Back in 2017, her painting a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of a historical figure, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the painting each day, 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. Looking back now, in a world increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful painting.
Legacy and Current Work
This might have ended her career, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She unavoidably came out of that experience a changed artist. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political art at the top tier.
