🔗 Share this article

The American painter smothers her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London exhibition 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

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as one of the most important figurative artists of her generation – is all about texture, application, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, real high-level aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s enough here to engage you for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, 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 baying crowds. One piece depicts a collection of forms stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their wake. In another features a person given a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual in front of a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and mob mentality is transforming all to rubbish.

An Embrace 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 follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green sit back in gilded seats – while in other works a couple console each other in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, rests naked, desolate and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, numerous references to pop culture (It seems certain that one painting is a portrait of a cartoon character from an animated series). You could spend hours identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the works.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical invites to interpretation. I feel as if one is tested on the symbolism of a Titian but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct themes: the ruling class, and the public that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her painting a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. An activist demonstrated against the painting each day, and some demanded it to be removed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of African-American suffering was the major headline of the biennial. This marked the height of the late 2010s culture wars, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a society more divided, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her professional life, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done now exists in its influence. She unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the highest level.