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

Dana Schutz smothers her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant tribute of her material, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading painters of her generation – is all about texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy losing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one shows a group of figures trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their wake. In another presents a person given a large disguise in some bizarre initiation ritual before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to interpret these as political, as observation on America’s condition, on how society is divided and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the people in power, rather than the masses that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a man in green sit back in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a couple console each other in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with references. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that one painting is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic invites to interpretation. I feel as if one is tested on the symbolism of a Titian but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. A protester picketed the painting each day, and some demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the biennial. This marked the height of the recent social conflicts, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a society more divided, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her career, and the artist likely aims to progress. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. She unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.