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The American painter cakes her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her first proper London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but some big messages are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – earning her acclaim as one of the most important figurative artists of her era – is focused on surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. In one shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of debris in their path. A different work presents a figure receiving a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to read any of this as social commentary, as commentary on America’s condition, on how society is divided and furious, and mob mentality is transforming all to waste.

An Embrace by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, rather than the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a green-clad man sit back in gilded seats – whereas in other works a pair comfort one another in a scene strewn with corpses, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, desolate and powerless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, covered in allusions. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, 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 littered the artworks.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the people in power, and the crowds that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the body of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. An activist demonstrated against the work daily, and others demanded it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of black pain was the biggest story 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 identical team. In retrospect, in a world more divided, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She inevitably came out of that ordeal a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.