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The American painter smothers her paintings in thick gobs of viscous pigment. Her first proper London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her era – is focused on texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in coats of color 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 initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. In one shows a collection of forms stomps senselessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. A different work presents a person given a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to read any of this as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to redirect attention to the people in power, instead of the masses that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man sit back in golden chairs – whereas in additional pieces a pair console each other in a scene filled with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, desolate and helpless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered art, covered in allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, countless nods to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). It would take time identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, 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 provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about that. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – 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 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. A protester demonstrated against the painting each day, and some called for it to be removed. An artist of European descent depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story 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 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 angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But all her subsequent work since exists in its shadow. She unavoidably came out of that experience a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.