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The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. This inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her material, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as one of the most important figurative artists of her era – is all about surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, 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 collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their wake. A different work presents a person receiving a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as observation on the state of the US, on how society is divided and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the crowds that follow them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in golden chairs – while in other works a couple comfort one another in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies naked, forlorn and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, filled with references. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of a cartoon character from an animated series). It would take time spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the artworks.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic invites to interpretation. It seems like one is tested on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. In 2017, her painting a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of a historical figure, a black teenager who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in 1955 – 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 work daily, and some called for it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the biennial. This marked the height of the recent social conflicts, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a world increasingly polarized, simplified and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her professional life, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. She unavoidably came out of that ordeal a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political painting at the top tier.