The American painter cakes her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. This first proper London exhibition is a messy, exuberant 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 one of the most important figurative artists of her era – is focused on texture, application, hue and substance. This is art for artists, real high-level aesthetic geekery. Should you enjoy immersing yourself in coats of color and shading, there’s enough here to engage you for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, dreamlike, animated, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the artworks resonate.
Initial Exhibition Pieces
The works in the first gallery are full of enormous one-eyed beings and baying crowds. One piece shows a group of figures stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their path. In another presents a figure given a large disguise in an odd ceremony in front of a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to read any of this as political, as observation on America’s condition, on how society is divided and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.
An Embrace by the artist.
Shift in Focus
In the other gallery space, Schutz seems to redirect attention to the people in power, instead of the masses that support them. Shadowy figures fill their faces with fruit and meat in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a green-clad man recline in golden chairs – while in other works a couple comfort one another in a landscape filled with dead bodies, and a woman, perhaps the artist, rests unclothed, forlorn and powerless in bed.
Inspirations and References
This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in references. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of an American painter, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the art historical tradition, countless nods to pop culture (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). You could spend hours spotting all the bits of Cézanne and David with which she’s sprinkled the artworks.
A Model by the exhibitor.
Meaning and Stories
Painting this dense, complex and allegorical invites to analysis. It seems like I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Titian but, in my view, there are two relatively clear narratives: the ruling class, and the crowds that they provoke.
Controversy and Impact
And Schutz should know about such dynamics. Back in 2017, her painting a titled piece – a semi-abstracted depiction of the body of a historical figure, a young African-American who was murdered by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – sparked immense debate when it was shown at the a New York exhibition. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. A protester picketed the work daily, and some called for it to be destroyed. A white artist painting – perhaps compassionately – a scene of black pain was the biggest story of the biennial. This marked the height of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that featured infighting even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world increasingly polarized, simplified and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful painting.
Legacy and Current Work
This might have ended her professional life, and Schutz probably wants to move on. But all her subsequent work now exists in its shadow. She inevitably came out of that ordeal a changed artist. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she continues to practice in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical painting at the top tier.
