I was introduced to Thomas Schutte’s work by a gallery owner who is in love with his work! I must admit, it is very much a strong, confident statement and I totally got it and loved it!
i hope you enjoy this post!
Love,
Jamie
“Fundamentally, my works are almost always in the nature of a proposal,” Thomas Schütte contends, while conceding that, nonetheless, mostly “they exist in the form of models.”Schütte’s notion of models is, consequently,
encompassing and complex: at its core lies the proposition, the hypothesis, the speculation. And, given that it is imbued with both a metaphorical and a literal dimension, it has assumed an extraordinarily diverse and multifarious
range of formulations in an œvre that now spans more than twenty years. Décor and scenographic and architectural models formed the vocabulary of Schütte’s first works. Vehicles for thought rather than action, they limned a
history of the reconstruction and reconstitution of the built environment in the postwar years, and, on occasion, proposed alternatives. Miniaturized worlds that are predicated on a kind of displaced placelessness,
they inscribe a restless nomadism that rigorously eschews the settled and established. In his memorials, which followed soon after, the cast of characters ranges from the historically (in)famous to the forgotten and the fictional,
from Hitler to the lone Gallic sailor Alain Colas, to the artist himself or his surrogates. As well as a number of large-scale works realized in public sites, he has made a series of speculative tableaux, often constructed from makeshift
structures and mundane materials.2 They have the appearance of rapid responses, temporary, even tentative, as if only in such terms can he avert rhetoric and grandiosity, and only through a kind of self-mocking inclusion of his
own image into this pantheon can he confront the perennial issues of glory, fame, and immortality. Ars longa, vita brevis: once a palliative to ambitious but underrecognized artists, in today’s era of instant celebrity this
precept
seems a pointless grail, or a poisoned chalice. The post-Cold War era has been indelibly marked by the toppling of a virtual army of statues dedicated to political and military luminaries formerly deemed invincible and unassailable.
It has also witnessed a host of fractious, unseemly, and inconclusive battles surrounding the creation of memorials to the victims of carnage and genocide. As a science, a Wissenschaft, the discipline of history was invented
by Hegel and the great nineteenth-century German historiographers.
House of Turquoise