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The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant celebration of her material, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading painters of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy losing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s plenty to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.

Works in the First Gallery

The works in the first gallery are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. In one shows a collection of forms trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their path. A different work features a figure receiving a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to interpret these as political, as observation on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is transforming all to waste.

An Embrace by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man sit back in gilded seats – while in other works a pair console each other in a landscape filled with corpses, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, forlorn and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in references. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, 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 a particular work is a depiction of a cartoon character 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.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic invites to analysis. It seems like one is tested on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the ruling class, and the crowds that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of a historical figure, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. An activist demonstrated against the painting daily, and others demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist depicting – perhaps compassionately – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the event. This marked the height of the late 2010s social conflicts, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, simplified and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming 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 all her subsequent work now exists in its shadow. She inevitably emerged of that experience a changed artist. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political art at the highest level.