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The American painter smothers her canvases in thick gobs of viscous pigment. This inaugural London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as a leading figurative artists of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, hue and substance. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy losing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you for a long time. But it’s her bizarre, surreal, cartoony, symbolic visuals that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Works in the First Gallery

These pieces in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. One piece shows a group of figures trudges mindlessly toward an event off canvas, brandishing fists and creating a path of debris in their wake. A different work features a person given a huge mask in some bizarre ceremony before a crowd of ugly supporters. It’s easy to read any of this as political, as observation on America’s condition, on how society is divided and angry, and crowd psychology is turning everything to waste.

An Embrace by the artist.

Changing Themes

In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the leaders and elites, instead of the crowds that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a man in green recline in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a couple console each other in a scene strewn with dead bodies, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests naked, desolate and helpless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered art, covered in allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the pink, corporeal animation of an American painter, the festive bizarre elements of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the art historical tradition, countless nods to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours 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, intricate and symbolic invites to analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are a couple of distinct narratives: the ruling class, and the public that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her painting a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the body of a historical figure, a black teenager who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of profiting from tragedy for her own gain. A protester picketed the work daily, and some demanded it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent depicting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the event. This marked the height of the recent culture wars, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that individuals found moments to get angry at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

It could have ruined her professional life, and the artist likely aims to move on. But everything she’s done since exists in its shadow. She unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a changed artist. But what remains constant is her exceptional skill, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, gloopy and deeply political art at the highest level.