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The American painter cakes her canvases in thick gobs of viscous pigment. Her first proper London show is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Her method – 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 keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that really makes the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece depicts a group of figures trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of debris in their wake. In another presents a figure given a large disguise in some bizarre initiation ritual before a horde of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to interpret these as social commentary, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

The Kiss by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds that support them. Mysterious forms stuff their mouths with fruit and meat in a sombre dining room; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in gilded seats – while in additional pieces a couple console each other in a landscape strewn with corpses, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, lies unclothed, desolate and powerless in bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, 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 James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of Paul McCarthy. There are riffs on the history of painting, countless nods to pop culture (I am almost 100% sure that a particular work is a depiction 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.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, complex and allegorical leaves itself open to analysis. I feel as if one is tested on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, for my money, there are two relatively clear narratives: the people in power, and the crowds that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about that. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state in the mid-20th century – caused untold controversy when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. A protester demonstrated against the painting daily, and others called for it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the major headline of the event. It was the peak of the late 2010s culture wars, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. Looking back now, in a society more divided, simplified and angrier than ever, it feels almost quaint that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful painting.

Legacy and Current Work

This might have ended her career, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its influence. She unavoidably emerged of that experience a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.