Thomas Schütte (B.1954)

Thomas Schütte studied at the storied Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Gerhard Richter in the early 1980s. There he developed an interest in the contemporary possibilities of figuration. Like others from his generation, Schütte was trying to process both the fraught legacy of World War II through an emerging focus on the body as a site of performance and ritual, as influentially positioned by Joseph Beuys who was, as much as Richter, the spiritual influence on a young Schütte. Wicht, the German word for “imp”, refers to the grotesque look of the series of rough hewn bronze busts that Schütte executed in 2006. These works are related, on the one hand, to the art historical tradition of picturing the outsider—including Jean Dubuffet’s interest in the art of children or the insane, and also August Sander’s psychological portraits of character types—and perhaps most closely those late studies by Theodore Gericault of individual heads and other body parts from the morgue. On the other, it echoes the post-Cubist sculptural tradition evinced in the bronze casts of Picasso, Boccioni, and Matisse. In these works we find, as in Schütte’s Wicht, a fracturing of the planes of the face and body that represent a structural analysis of the formal composition of these elements. Schütte finds that this is the ideal language for an examination of the more perverse elements of society, a certain monstrosity built into this mode of formal analysis. Thus Schütte essentially links up that formalist art historical line with that of the interest in outsider art.