ART CITIES:Berlin-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 Efi Michalarou
Photo: Carlier|Gebauer Gallery Archive

In his solo exhibition with works created over the last six years at Carlier|Gebauer Gallery in Berlin, Thomas Schütte, approaches his practice as a “seismograph” of the world around him. For the exhibition the artist revisits familiar themes, including human countenances, groupings of figures, and architectural studies. Unrestricted by medium or dimensions, his pieces are rendered in steel, Murano glass, bronze, and ceramic, in forms ranging from small tabletop models to woodcuts to looming sculptures. In this selection, Schütte directs his attention towards the otherness of the face and the body: whether as authoritative grotesques or modernist abstractions, he navigates reductions in form to achieve studies that are fragmented,  silent and singular, even when presented in groups. What ultimately remains is the essence of the figure as a reflection of some perceived characteristic only the artist is privy to. There is always a touch of tenderness in the grotesque, strength in the vulnerable, and humor in the monstrous. What is startling, and at the same time reassuring, is that the work doesn’t mirror life in the black and white terms of contemporary pop culture imagery.  Rather, Schütte’s work strikes a harmonious balance between the nuances of our precarious reality and the figures that he has shaped as a reflection of our existence within it.

Info: carlier|gebauer Gallery, Markgrafenstraße 67, Berlin, Duration: 28/4-7/6/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.carliergebauer.com