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Dana Schutz smothers her paintings in thick gobs of viscous pigment. Her first proper London exhibition is a messy, exuberant tribute of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – earning her acclaim as one of the most important figurative artists of her era – is all about surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. This is art for artists, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that truly drives the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece shows a group of figures stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of debris in their path. In another presents a person given a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony before a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s easy to read any of this as political, as commentary on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, rather than the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a man in green recline in gilded seats – whereas in other works a pair comfort one another in a landscape filled with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, forlorn and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, countless nods to pop culture (It seems certain that one painting is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the works.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

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

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about that. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by two white men in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist picketed the work daily, and others demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent painting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of black pain was the major headline of the biennial. It was the peak of the recent culture wars, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But all her subsequent work now exists in its influence. She unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political art at the top tier.