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The American painter cakes her paintings in heavy layers of viscous pigment. This first proper London show is a messy, exuberant tribute of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as a leading figurative artists of her era – is all about texture, application, colour and materiality. This is art for artists, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to keep you going for a long time. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the initial room are populated by giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. In one depicts a group of figures trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, waving hands and creating a path of debris in their wake. A different work presents a person receiving a large disguise in some bizarre initiation ritual in front of a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as social commentary, as commentary on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.

An Embrace by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, instead of the masses that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a man in green sit back in golden chairs – whereas in other works a pair console each other in a scene filled with dead bodies, and a female figure, perhaps the artist, lies naked, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, filled with allusions. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the pink, corporeal animation of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the bits of Cézanne and David 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 interpretation. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct themes: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the body of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by two white men in a southern state in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. She was accused of profiting from tragedy for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the work each day, and others called for it to be removed. A white artist depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the biennial. It was the peak of the recent culture wars, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a world increasingly polarized, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to progress. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She unavoidably emerged of that experience a transformed creator. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the top tier.