Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her first proper London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her material, but some big messages are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.
The Artist's Technique
Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important figurative artists of her generation – is focused on texture, application, hue and substance. This is art for artists, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.
Initial Exhibition Pieces
The works in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. One piece depicts a group of figures trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their wake. A different work presents a person given a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony in front of a horde of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and crowd psychology is transforming all to waste.
An Embrace by the artist.
Shift in Focus
In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – while in additional pieces a pair comfort one another in a landscape strewn with corpses, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests naked, forlorn and powerless in a bed.
Inspirations and References
This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, filled with references. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a portrait of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.
The Example by Dana Schutz.
Meaning and Stories
Painting this dense, complex and allegorical invites to interpretation. I feel as if one is tested on the meaning of a Titian but, for my money, there are two relatively clear narratives: the people in power, and the public that they provoke.
Controversy and Impact
And the artist understands about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American who was lynched by racist perpetrators 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. A protester demonstrated against the painting daily, and others demanded it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the biennial. This marked the height of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a world more divided, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.
Legacy and Current Work
It could have ruined her career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done now exists in its influence. She unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political art at the top tier.
