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The American painter cakes her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. This first proper London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her material, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as a leading figurative artists of her era – is all about texture, application, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you 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 populated by enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. In one depicts a group of figures stomps senselessly towards something off canvas, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of debris in their wake. In another presents a figure given a large disguise in an odd ceremony before a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as political, as observation on America’s condition, on how society is divided and furious, and mob mentality is transforming all to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that support them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a religious figure and a man in green recline in golden chairs – whereas in additional pieces a pair console each other in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, desolate and powerless in bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, covered in references. There’s the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, numerous references to mainstream media (It seems certain that one painting is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Meaning and Stories

Art this complex, complex and allegorical invites to interpretation. It seems like one is tested on the symbolism of a Titian 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 such dynamics. Back in 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the body of a historical figure, a young African-American who was lynched by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. An activist demonstrated against the painting each day, and some demanded it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of African-American suffering was the biggest story of the biennial. It was the peak of the recent culture wars, a time that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, simplified and more hostile than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful painting.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She inevitably came out of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political painting at the highest level.