🔗 Share this article

The American painter smothers her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important figurative artists of her era – is focused on surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the initial room are full of giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. In one depicts a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of debris in their wake. A different work features a person given a large disguise in an odd ceremony in front of a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as commentary on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and mob mentality is transforming all to waste.

The Kiss by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the crowds that support 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 console each other in a scene strewn with dead bodies, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, forlorn and helpless in a 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 an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, numerous references to mainstream media (It seems certain that one painting is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). It would take time spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the works.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, complex and allegorical invites to interpretation. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Titian 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 that. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the painting daily, and others called for it to be removed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the event. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and the artist likely aims to progress. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. 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.