Review by Dana Schutz – An Orgy of the Painter That Outraged New York | art

DAnna Schutz decorates her canvases with thick blobs of sticky paint. The American artist’s first real exhibition in London is a joyful and orgy celebration of her material, but there are some big messages smuggled in if you can slog your way through them.

Schutz’s approach—which has earned her acclaim as one of the most important visual artists of her generation—is about surface, brushstrokes, color, and materiality. It’s a painter’s painting, real stuff with a high level of artistry. If you lose your kicks in the layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it is Schutz’s bizarre, surreal, cartoonish and metaphorical images that make the paintings truly special.

The works in the first gallery are filled with giant-headed giants and noisy crowds. In one, a group of people unconsciously stomp toward something outside the canvas, waving their fists and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. In another, someone is given a huge mask in a bizarre ritual in front of a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as political, as a commentary on the state of the United States, how divided and angry society is, and how mob mentality turns everything into nonsense.

In another gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, rather than the crowds who follow them. Mysterious figures stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a dreary dining room; A cardinal and a man dressed in green recline on golden chairs – while in other works a couple consoles each other in a landscape littered with corpses, and a woman, perhaps Schutz herself, lies naked, miserable and helpless in bed.

This is very dense stuff, thickly layered, and covered in hints. There’s the dreamy, surreal symbolism of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink caricature of Philip Guston, the carnival-esque weirdness of James Ensor, and the sheer eccentricity of Paul McCarthy. There are talks about the history of painting, and countless nods to pop culture (I’m almost 100% sure one of the paintings is a picture of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours discovering all the parts of Cézanne and David that are littered throughout the works.

Painting this dense, complex and metaphorical picture leaves itself open to interpretation. I feel as if I’m being asked about Titian’s allegory, but for my money, there are two relatively clear narratives: the people in power, and the mobs they hunt.

And Schutz should know that. In 2017, her painting “Open Casket”—a semi-abstract depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager lynched by two white men in Mississippi in 1955—caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial in New York. She was accused of exploiting the Black Death for her own gain. One demonstrator staged a sit-in against the painting daily, and others demanded its destruction. The white artist’s painting—arguably one with a great deal of empathy—represents the landscape of black pain was the biggest story of the biennale. It was the height of the culture wars in the late 2010s, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a world more divided, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it seems strange that people would have time to get angry at such a sad, honest painting.

This could have ruined her career, and Schutz might want to move on. But everything I’ve done since then exists in her shadow. I definitely emerged from that experience a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is how good it is, and how it’s still engaged in brilliant, sick, dark, and profound political painting at the highest level.