Thomas Dane, London
The artist, whose painting of Emmett Till caused a scandal, is back with a grotesque, cartoonish, deeply political commentary on American society
ana Schutz cakes her canvases in thick gobs of gooey paint. The American artist’s first proper London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her material, but there are some big messages smuggled through if you can scratch your way towards them.
Schutz’s approach – which has seen her lauded as one of the most important figurative artists of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, real high-level art-nerd stuff. If you get your kicks losing 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, metaphorical imagery that really makes the paintings tick.
The works in the first gallery are full of giant-headed cyclopses and baying crowds. In one, a group of figures stomps senselessly towards something off canvas, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of trash in their wake. In another, a figure is given a huge mask in some bizarre initiation ritual in front of a horde of ugly supporters. It’s not hard to read any of this as political, as commentary on the state of the US, on how society is divided and angry, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.
