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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. This inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – earning her acclaim as one of the most important painters of her era – is focused on texture, application, hue and substance. This is art for artists, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that really makes the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. In one shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of debris in their path. In another presents a figure receiving a large disguise in an odd initiation ritual before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to interpret these as political, as commentary on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is transforming all to waste.

The Kiss by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the crowds that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a green-clad man recline in golden chairs – whereas in additional pieces a couple comfort one another in a scene strewn with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies naked, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with references. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods 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 identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the artworks.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, complex and allegorical invites to interpretation. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the people in power, and the public that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of a historical figure, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. An activist picketed the painting each day, and others demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of African-American suffering was the major headline of the biennial. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, simplified and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She unavoidably emerged of that experience a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.