Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: An Orgy of Gloop from the Artist Who Outraged NYC

Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This 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.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her generation – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy losing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s plenty to engage you for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one depicts a group of figures trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of trash in their path. In another presents a person receiving a large disguise in an odd ceremony in front of a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on how society is divided and furious, and mob mentality is transforming all to rubbish.

An Embrace by Dana Schutz.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the crowds that support them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in golden chairs – while in other works a couple comfort one another in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests naked, forlorn and powerless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a depiction of a cartoon character from an animated series). It would take time spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the artworks.

The Example by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to interpretation. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, and the public that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the body of a historical figure, a black teenager who was murdered by two white men in Mississippi in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. A protester demonstrated against the painting each day, and some called for it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of African-American suffering was the major headline of the event. It was the peak of the recent culture wars, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world 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.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her professional life, and the artist likely aims to move on. But all her subsequent work now exists in its influence. She inevitably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political art at the top tier.