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The American painter cakes her canvases in thick gobs of gooey paint. Her inaugural London show is a splodgy, orgiastic tribute of her material, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

Schutz's Approach

Schutz’s approach – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her generation – is all about texture, application, hue and substance. This is art for artists, real high-level art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy losing yourself in coats of color and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the artworks resonate.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

These pieces in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece shows a group of figures trudges mindlessly towards something outside the frame, waving hands and leaving a trail of trash in their path. A different work presents a person receiving a large disguise in an odd ceremony before a horde 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 waste.

The Kiss 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 masses that support them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a green-clad man sit back in golden chairs – while in additional pieces a pair comfort one another in a landscape filled with corpses, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, forlorn and helpless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in references. You’ll find the dreamy surreal symbolism of a symbolist master, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. She includes nods on the history of painting, numerous references to mainstream media (I am almost 100% sure that one painting is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters 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 interpretation. I feel as if one is tested on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are two relatively clear themes: the people in power, and the crowds that they bait.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork Open Casket – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by racist perpetrators in a southern state in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the a New York exhibition. She was accused of exploiting black death for her own gain. A protester demonstrated against the painting each day, and others demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the major headline of the event. This marked the height 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 world increasingly polarized, simplified and more hostile than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get angry at this heartfelt, sorrowful artwork.

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 ordeal a changed artist. But what hasn’t changed is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the highest level.