Dana 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.
