ART CITIES: Athens-Thomas Schütte

Thomas Schütte’s installations, sculptures, prints, drawings and watercolours take different and often contradictory forms. Schütte’s art looks utilitarian offering sustenance, shelter and companionship yet delivers false promises and alien worlds. He uses a wide spectrum of colours and a range of materials to revise the basic constituents of everyday life whilst exploring fundamental question about the artist and society.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Bernier/Eliades Gallery Arcjive

For his solo exhibition in Athens, Thomas Schütte created a new series of sculptures, ceramics and watercolors. Drawing inspiration from ancient Greek and Roman sculpture, early modernist sculpture and postmodern architecture, Schütte’s practice incorporates narrative and representationality, often highlighting the political dimensions of art. Thomas Schütte was born in 1954 in Oldenburg. He was enrolled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1973. Among his fellow students were many of today’s internationally acclaimed artists, including Thomas Ruff and Katarina Fritsch. The works from his student years are distinctly influenced by 1970s minimalism and conceptualism. Thomas Schütte often works serially. Over the years, he has built a repertoire of motifs, shapes and themes that he revisits, develops and adapts to different dimensions or unexpected materials. The monumental bronze sculptures “United Enemies” (2011) outside the Skulpturenhalle* observe visitors as they arrive. The works are based on a series of eponymous works on a considerably smaller scale that he began making in 1992. These small three-legged figures were dressed in fabric and tied together two and two before being placed under bell jars on plinths. The figures are each other’s prisoners. In 2011, nearly twenty years later, when Thomas Schütte returned to this motif, he enlarged the “enemies” to larger than life size. The figures in the new series have got down from their pedestals and turned into grotesque giants cast in one of the most tradition-laden materials in art history – bronze. Various kinds of architectural models have a key role in Thomas Schütte’s artistic practice. He refers to these explorations as a way of opening up works to the viewer: “I use models because they are something anyone can understand. You can see them as a prototype for something bigger, something seen from a child’s perspective; you could see them as a public stage”. In his series “One Man Houses” (2003-05), Schütte has combined units from an industrial ventilation system into shiny, minimalist sculptures. Later, Schütte made the houses in wood, slightly larger than life, and fitted them with carefully-made furniture. In 2007-2009, one of the houses was built in a life-size version in the Roanne region in France, and more recently, several of his architectural models have also been produced in the same dimensions. The most recent example is his own foundation and sculpture hall Skulpturenhalle, outside Düsseldorf, which opened in spring 2016. The architectural model “Pringles” (2011) is an early version of the building, where the curved roof is modelled on a potato crisp placed on a matchbox.

* The Skulpturenhalle Neuss is an exhibition hall for art in Neuss in North Rhine-Westphalia, bordering Hombroich to the south. It was designed by artist Thomas Schütte and opened in 2016. The Skulpaturenhalle is run by the Thomas Schütte Foundation.

Photo: Thomas Schütte, Seven Angels, 2024, Glazed ceramic Set of seven, each: 72 x 55 x 4 cm, © Thomas Schütte, Photo: Boris Kirpotin, Courtesy the artist and Bernier/Eliades Gallery

Info: Bernier/Eliades Gallery, 11 Eptachalkou Street, Athens, Greece,  Duration: 16/11/2024-4/3/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-16:00, https://bernier-eliades.com/