PRESENTATION: Thomas Schütte-Westkunstmodelle

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: De Pont Museum Archive

More than forty years after he first envisioned them, three of Thomas Schütte’s architectural models from the legendary “Westkunst” exhibition (1981) take shape at full scale. De Pont Museum shows three works from this artist – a core maker in its collection – in the main gallery of the former woollen mill. The pieces “Schiff”, “Bühne” and “Kiste” invite visitors to climb stairs, stand on a stage or retreat into a hidden interior space. Over the past four decades, Schütte has built an oeuvre that is one of the most influential and yet elusive in contemporary art. The exhibition “Westkunstmodelle” mark the starting point for both his oeuvre and this exhibition, which offers a retrospective of his architectural models from the 1980s to the present. The architectural models also serve as a connecting link within Schütte’s incredibly diverse body of work: they bring together, in concentrated form, the wide-ranging visual forms and themes that characterise his artistic practice. “Westkunst: Zeitgenössische Kunst seit 1939” was a much-discussed exhibition held in Cologne in 1981 and intended as an overview of Western modern art. Upon being invited to participate in the show, the then-young Schütte created three designs. Because the exhibition budget was insufficient to fully realise these ambitious works, the artist presented them on tables as small-scale models. This unexpectedly yielded the basis for decades of experimentation involving architectural models. In this form, Schütte found a means of escaping the dominant paradigm of conceptual art: a model is, on the one hand, a proposal for something that does not (yet) exist, while at the same time, it is also a tangible sculpture on a plinth. Besides the three impressive and large-scale “Westkunstmodelle”, the exhibition also provides an extensive overview of Schütte’s architectural models, with essential works such as “Ferienhaus für Terroristen”, “One Man House” and “Mein Grab” on display in the adjacent wool-storage rooms and galleries. While some of his works have been turned into actual buildings in the intervening years (including his own museum, the Skulpturenhalle in Neuss, near Düsseldorf), the artist never sought to establish a career as an architect. For Schütte, the models are a metaphor for his own (ironic and not always cheerful) perspective on society and the art world. They include a gravestone in the form of a house, countless bunkers, studios and single-occupant homes into which a person could peacefully withdraw. Schütte’s work centres on the unbridled freedom of exploration and his inquisitive approach to form and material. Almost forty years later, the artist’s oeuvre still resonates and the scale models continue to excite the imagination. Strolling through the exhibition, the visitor undergoes unexpected transformations. One minute, they are changed into a giant when confronted by a dollhouse, and the next, they suddenly find themselves inside a building. By executing the plans for “Schiff”, “Bühne” and “Kiste” today, the material gains new relevance and Schütte offers a unique experience in which he momentarily bends the visitor’s perceptions to his will.

Photo: Thomas Schütte, Ferienhaus für Terroristen I (Modell 1:10), 2006-2007, wood, zink sheet, perspex, mixed media, 150,5 x 220 x 170 cm, House: 48,8 x 182 x 78 cm, Photo: Nic Tenwiggenhorn, © Thomas Schütte, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2023

Info: De Pont Museum, Wilhelminapark 1, Tilburg, the Netherlands, Duration: 16/9/2023-28/1/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-17:00, https://depont.nl/en/