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Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant celebration of her material, but significant themes are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – earning her acclaim as one of the most important figurative artists of her era – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s plenty to keep you going for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that really makes the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the initial room are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. One piece depicts a group of figures trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of trash in their path. A different work features a person given a large disguise in an odd ceremony in front of a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as commentary on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and crowd psychology is transforming all to waste.

The Kiss by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the people in power, rather than the masses that support them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – whereas in additional pieces a couple console each other in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests naked, desolate and helpless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with references. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, 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 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 works.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. I feel as if one is tested on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the people in power, and the crowds that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about that. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the body of a historical figure, a black teenager who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. An activist demonstrated against the painting daily, and others called for it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the major headline of the biennial. This marked the height of the recent social conflicts, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a society more divided, simplified and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her professional life, and the artist likely aims to move on. But all her subsequent work since exists in its influence. She inevitably came out 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 art at the highest level.