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Dana Schutz smothers her paintings in thick gobs of gooey paint. This inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant celebration of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her era – is all about texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. One piece shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something off canvas, waving hands and leaving a trail of trash in their path. In another features a person receiving a large disguise in an odd ceremony before a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s easy to read any of this as political, as commentary on the state of the US, on how society is divided and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

The Kiss by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – whereas in other works a couple comfort one another in a scene filled with corpses, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies unclothed, desolate and helpless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the works.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, complex and allegorical invites to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the symbolism of a Titian but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. A protester demonstrated against the painting each day, and others called for 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. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a society more divided, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her professional life, and the artist likely aims to progress. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She unavoidably came out of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical art at the top tier.