The Artist Dana Schutz Exhibition Overview: A Feast of Gloop from the Painter Who Shocked New York
Dana Schutz cakes her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.
The Artist's Technique
Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as a leading figurative artists of her era – is all about surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. This is art for artists, real high-level aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s plenty to engage you for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.
Works in the First Gallery
These pieces in the initial room are full of giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. One piece shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. A different work features a figure given a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual in front of a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as commentary on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is transforming all to rubbish.
The Kiss by the artist.
Shift in Focus
In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, rather than the masses that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a man in green recline in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a pair console each other in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, forlorn and helpless in bed.
Influences and Allusions
This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, filled with references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, countless nods to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work 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 littered the works.
A Model by Dana Schutz.
Meaning and Stories
Art this complex, intricate and symbolic invites to analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are two relatively clear narratives: the people in power, and the public that they bait.
The 2017 Scandal
And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – 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 – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. An activist picketed the work each day, and some called for it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the biennial. This marked the height of the recent culture wars, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a world more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.
Aftermath and Recent Art
It could have ruined her career, and the artist likely aims to progress. But all her subsequent work now exists in its influence. She unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.
