The Artist Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: An Orgy of Thick Paint from the Painter Who Outraged NYC
Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her first proper London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.
Schutz's Approach
Her method – earning her acclaim as one of the most important figurative artists of her era – is all about texture, application, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the artworks resonate.
Works in the First Gallery
The works in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. One piece depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their path. A different work features a person given a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony before a crowd of ugly supporters. 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 transforming all to rubbish.
The Kiss by Dana Schutz.
Shift in Focus
In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the people in power, rather than the crowds that support them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in golden chairs – while in additional pieces a pair console each other in a scene filled with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests naked, forlorn and powerless in a bed.
Influences and Allusions
This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with allusions. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, numerous references 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 identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the works.
The Example by the exhibitor.
Meaning and Stories
Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. I feel as if one is tested on the meaning of a Titian but, for my money, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the crowds that they provoke.
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 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. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. A protester picketed the work each day, and some called for it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the major headline of the biennial. It was the peak of the late 2010s social conflicts, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world more divided, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.
Aftermath and Recent Art
This might have ended her professional life, and the artist likely aims to move on. But all her subsequent work since exists in its influence. She inevitably emerged of that experience a transformed creator. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the highest level.
