Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in thick gobs of gooey paint. Her first proper London show is a messy, exuberant tribute of her material, but significant themes are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.
Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as one of the most important painters of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. This is art for artists, real high-level aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to engage you for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that truly drives the artworks resonate.
The works in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. One piece shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of debris in their wake. In another presents a figure given a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on how society is divided and furious, and crowd psychology is transforming all to waste.
The Kiss by Dana Schutz.
In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the people in power, instead of the crowds that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a pair console each other in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, lies unclothed, desolate and helpless in bed.
This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in allusions. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, countless nods to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a portrait of a cartoon character from an animated series). It would take time spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the works.
A Model by Dana Schutz.
Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic invites to analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the symbolism 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.
And the artist understands about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her painting Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in a southern state in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. An activist demonstrated against the work each day, and some called for it to be removed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the biennial. This marked the height of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a society more divided, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.
This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its shadow. She inevitably emerged of that experience a transformed creator. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political painting at the top tier.
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