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The American painter smothers her paintings in thick gobs of gooey paint. Her inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but some big messages are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading painters of her generation – is focused on surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one depicts a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their path. In another presents a figure receiving a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony in front of a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as commentary on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is transforming all to waste.

The Kiss by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the masses that follow them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a man in green sit back in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a couple console each other in a landscape strewn with corpses, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with allusions. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods 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 bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s littered the artworks.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct themes: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of a historical figure, a young African-American who was lynched by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the work each day, and others called for it to be removed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of black pain was the major headline 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. Looking back now, in a society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. She inevitably came out of that experience a transformed creator. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political art at the top tier.