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The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. Her inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her material, but significant themes 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 surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, real high-level aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shading, there’s enough here to keep you going for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the initial room are full of giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. One piece shows a group of figures stomps senselessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and creating a path of trash in their wake. A different work features a person receiving a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on how society is divided and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, rather than the crowds that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a man in green recline in gilded seats – while in other works a couple comfort one another in a scene strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, rests naked, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is extremely complex, multi-layered stuff, filled with allusions. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism 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 history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a depiction of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time spotting all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the works.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed 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 bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And Schutz should know about that. Back in 2017, her painting a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the work each day, and others demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the biennial. It was the peak of the late 2010s social conflicts, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a society increasingly polarized, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. She unavoidably emerged of that experience a transformed creator. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political art at the highest level.