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Dana Schutz smothers her paintings in thick gobs of gooey paint. Her inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – which has seen her lauded as a leading figurative artists of her generation – is focused on texture, application, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s plenty to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their path. In another features a person receiving a huge mask in an odd initiation ritual before a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as social commentary, as commentary on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, rather than the crowds that support them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – whereas in other works a pair console each other in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests unclothed, forlorn and helpless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with references. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the artworks.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic invites to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct themes: the people in power, and the public that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the body of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. A protester demonstrated against the work each day, and some demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the event. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a society more divided, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

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 inevitably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political art at the highest level.