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The American painter cakes her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. This inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her material, but some big messages are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – earning her acclaim as one of the most important figurative artists of her generation – is focused on texture, application, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. In one depicts a group of figures trudges mindlessly towards something off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their path. A different work features a figure receiving a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony in front of a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and mob mentality is transforming all to waste.

An Embrace by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, rather than the crowds that follow them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a couple console each other in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, rests naked, forlorn and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with references. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the works.

The Example by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic invites to interpretation. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the people in power, and the public that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of a historical figure, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist demonstrated against the painting each day, and some demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of African-American suffering was the major headline of the biennial. It was the peak of the recent culture wars, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get angry at this emotional, mournful painting.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She inevitably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.