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The American painter smothers her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This inaugural London exhibition is a messy, exuberant celebration of her material, but significant themes are smuggled through if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as one of the most important painters of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, 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 plenty to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that really makes the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. One piece shows a group of figures stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their wake. In another features a figure receiving a large disguise in an odd initiation ritual before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to interpret these as political, as observation on the state of the US, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds that follow them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a green-clad man sit back in gilded seats – while in other works a couple comfort one another in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, lies unclothed, forlorn and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with allusions. You’ll find the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the works.

A Model 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 Titian but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the people in power, and the public that they bait.

Controversy and Impact

And Schutz should know about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of Emmett Till, a young African-American who was lynched by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her own gain. A protester demonstrated against the painting daily, and some called for it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the event. 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 more divided, simplified and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her career, and the artist likely aims to progress. 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 still engages in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical art at the top tier.