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Dana Schutz cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. This inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading painters of her era – is focused on surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, real high-level aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. One piece shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their path. A different work presents a person given a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony in front of a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on how society is divided and furious, and mob mentality is transforming all to rubbish.

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 masses that support them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green recline in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a pair console each other in a landscape filled with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, desolate and helpless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, covered in allusions. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the history of painting, numerous references to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a portrait of a cartoon character from an animated series). You could spend hours spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the works.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Titian but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American who was lynched by two white men in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. An activist picketed the painting each day, and others demanded 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. It was the peak of the recent culture wars, 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 heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her professional life, and the artist likely aims to progress. But everything she’s done since exists in its shadow. She inevitably emerged of that experience a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.