ART CITIES: Madrid-Thomas Schütte
Thomas Schütte is best known as a sculptor, but his practice includes a wide range of media and formats. The artist describes himself as a seismograph that registers phenomena around him. His works touches on eternal questions concerning the human condition, freedom and responsibility, power and vulnerability. The intimate and personal is juxtaposed with the monumental and authoritarian.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: carlier|gebauer Gallery
Thomas Schütte in his solo exhibition in Spain, presents five ceramics from the series “Old Friends Revisited” and a large “Frauenkopf” (Woman’s Head) as well as the portfolio “Old Friends Revisited – 12 Scenes” consisting of inkjet pigment prints, the exhibition showcases a cycle of works that has held the sculptor’s creative attention for thirty years. Schütte stages the grotesque presences of “Old Friends Revisited”, by endowing the classic portrait bust with ludicrous shaping of the facial features and gaudily colored, reflecting glazes. The “old friends” first made their appearance in the form of figures with more or less fist-sized heads in 1992 when Schütte held a residential scholarship in the Villa Massimo in Rome and legal investigations were revealing hitherto inconceivable ties between the worlds of politics and organized crime. Continuously, the artist recalls, “these shifty, crooked faces” were present in the media. The boundless political and moral corruption seems to have served Schütte as a stimulus and justification for abandoning the marriage of the human face to natural forms, as firmly inscribed by art history, in favor of figurative excesses. It is not as if the Old Friends were bestowing a face on moral degeneracy and turpitude: quite the reverse, Schütte’s heads display the impossibility of giving visual form to wickedness and criminal wrong-doing. Elaborately modelled physiognomies proclaim their disjunction from the meanings they lead one to expect. What such severance from conventional ties makes possible is a contagious delight in formal inventions. Together with the return to tried and tested models of sculptural embodiment from earlier years, the semiological break seems to enable Schütte to expand extraordinarily the aesthetic potential of his art. This transgression of limits finds expression especially in the experimental, unusually rich and gleaming surfaces of the sculptures, produced by the rule-contravening overlaying of two different glazes and the correspondingly unforeseeable material effects. The intrusion into the world of images of faces that are simultaneously repulsive and aesthetically lavish is given genealogical validation by an ancestral gallery of “old friends” – large-format, inkjet-printed photographs of small heads made of coloured modelling compound. Schütte confronts and contrasts the hideous faces of the “Old Friends Revisited” with a female head. “I thought,” he says, “that it was time to make completely still figures, their eyes lowered, really beautiful things”. The tranquil face of the self-absorbed figure is a further character from Schütte’s puppet theatre. It stands for loveliness and inwardness and is thus just as much a formulaic construct as the “old friends”.
Photo: Exhibition view: Thomas Schütte, carlier|gebauer Gallery-Madrid, Courtesy carlier |gebauer Gallery
Info: carlier | gebauer Gallery, Calle de José Marañón, 4, Madrid, Spain, Duration: 25/2-23/4/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.carliergebauer.com
