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Dana Schutz smothers her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. This inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her medium, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – which has seen her lauded as a leading figurative artists of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy losing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s enough here to engage you for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that really makes the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the initial room are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. One piece depicts a collection of forms trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their wake. A different work presents a person receiving a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to interpret these as social commentary, as observation on the state of the US, on how society is divided and furious, and crowd psychology is transforming all to waste.

An Embrace by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the people in power, instead of the masses that follow them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in gilded seats – while in other works a pair console each other in a landscape strewn with corpses, and a woman, perhaps the artist, lies unclothed, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with allusions. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the history of painting, numerous references to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a depiction of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical invites to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, and the public that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about that. Back in 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered 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 exploiting black death for her own gain. A protester picketed the painting daily, and some demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of African-American suffering was the major headline of the event. This marked the height of the late 2010s social conflicts, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world more divided, simplified and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and the artist likely aims to move on. But all her subsequent work since exists in its influence. She inevitably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political art at the top tier.