THOMAS SCHÜTTE

Schütte’s multivalent practice incorporates painting, drawing, printmaking, architectural model making, and sculpture. Having emerged as an artist after the development of Conceptual art and rejecting that movement’s attempted refusal of the body, Schütte uses the human figure as a means of inquiry into aesthetics and culture, often with a sardonic, critical stance toward tradition. Among his most ambitious and provocative series, Frauen is a sequence of eighteen works made between 1998 and 2006.

The poses, stylization, and materiality of the Frauen vary widely. Reclining, sitting, crouching, and hanging off the sides of their table-like pedestals, the figures are transformed and amended by pose and sculptural gesture, radical explorations of the human body as perceived and imagined.

The Frauen engage with the classical and neoclassical traditions of the reclining female nude. They relate as well as to the revisitations of and challenges to the subject by artists including Aristide Maillol, Henri Matisse, and Henry Moore, and to Cubist and Futurist innovations in sculpture by Pablo Picasso and Umberto Boccioni. Schütte’s works emphasize both figuration—embodying human anatomy and agency—and abstraction, dramatizing the malleability of their mediums.

The series originated in a group of 120 small glazed ceramic sketches of women on cuboid bases that Schütte produced between 1997 and 1999. From these spontaneously sculpted studies, the artist selected figures to enlarge in polystyrene. He further developed the forms by applying jute and plaster, before casting them. Each work is distinct due to Schütte’s choices regarding representation of flesh, manipulation of clay, and transmutation into metal.

The resulting bronze, steel, and aluminum figures on custom steel plinths are titled after their materials—Bronzefrau, Stahlfrau, and_Aluminiumfrau_. Each of the mediums substantially alters the sculptures, from the darkness of bronze, to the patina of rusty, weathered steel that matches their plinths, and the bright, reflective surfaces of lacquered aluminum.

Torso is a related work in polished bronze at the same scale as the six exhibited Frauen. Its arcing, prone form is ringed by smooth, bulging folds similar to those of the Große Geister (Big Spirits)seriesthat Schütte made between 1995 and 2004.

Genealogies, the first major exhibition of Schütte’s work in Italy, will open at Punta della Dogana, Venice, in April 2025.