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The American painter cakes her canvases in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This first proper London exhibition 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 painters of her era – is all about surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the initial room are full of enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. In one depicts a group of figures trudges mindlessly toward an event outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their wake. A different work presents a figure receiving a huge mask in an odd ceremony in front of a horde of ugly supporters. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as observation on the state of the US, on societal splits and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, instead of the crowds that follow them. Shadowy figures stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – while in additional pieces a couple comfort one another in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests naked, desolate and helpless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, numerous references to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a depiction of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic invites to analysis. I feel as if one is tested on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece 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 such dynamics. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a black teenager who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. An activist demonstrated against the work each day, and some demanded it to be removed. A white artist painting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of African-American suffering was the major headline of the biennial. This marked the height of the recent social conflicts, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her career, and the artist likely aims to move on. But all her subsequent work since exists in its shadow. She inevitably emerged of that ordeal a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is her exceptional skill, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political painting at the top tier.