The Artist Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: A Feast of Gloop from the Artist Who Outraged New York
The American painter smothers her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant tribute of her medium, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.
Schutz's Approach
Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as a leading figurative artists of her era – is all about texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s plenty to keep you going for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.
Works in the First Gallery
These pieces in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. In one depicts a collection of forms trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. In another presents a person given a large disguise in an odd initiation ritual in front of a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as commentary on the state of the US, on how society is divided and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.
An Embrace by Dana Schutz.
Shift in Focus
In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – while in other works a pair comfort one another in a landscape filled with corpses, and a woman, perhaps the artist, lies unclothed, desolate and powerless in bed.
Inspirations and References
This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with allusions. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work 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 sprinkled the artworks.
A Model by the exhibitor.
Meaning and Stories
Art this complex, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to interpretation. I feel as if one is tested on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the public that they bait.
The 2017 Scandal
And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her painting a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the body of a historical figure, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in a southern state in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. A protester demonstrated against the painting each day, and some called for it to be removed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of African-American suffering was the major headline of the event. This marked the height of the late 2010s social conflicts, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, simplified and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful painting.
Aftermath and Recent Art
It could have ruined her career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But all her subsequent work now exists in its shadow. She inevitably came out of that experience a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political art at the highest level.
