Dana Schutz Review: A Feast of Thick Paint from the Painter Who Outraged New York
The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her first proper 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 figurative artists of her generation – is focused on surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty 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 initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one depicts a group of figures stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of trash in their path. A different work presents a person receiving a huge mask in an odd ceremony before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as political, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.
The Kiss by Dana Schutz.
Changing Themes
In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – while in other works a couple console each other in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests naked, desolate and powerless in bed.
Influences and Allusions
This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the history of painting, countless nods to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a portrait of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the works.
The Example by the exhibitor.
Interpretation and Narratives
Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic invites to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Titian but, for my money, there are two relatively clear narratives: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke.
The 2017 Scandal
And Schutz should know about such dynamics. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. 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 removed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – 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 featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, simplified and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming 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 all her subsequent work now exists in its influence. She unavoidably emerged of that experience a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political art at the highest level.
