Thomas Schütte

Thomas Schütte is an artist of resistance, and in this capacity he is certainly one of Galerie Schöttle's most unusual and most uncompromising artists.  Resistance is not only the trademark of his art but also the trademark of his attitude both towards art-historical tradition and to the established art world of today.

Since the middle of the 1980s, Thomas Schütte has been defending his place in contemporay art against all fleeting fashions and short-lived art styles and movements – his chosen path is as individual as it is unusual, and it is not always easy for the viewer to follow him.  But that is precisely the challenge which his art poses. It challenges everybody and everything. "The things you cannot talk about – these are essential. Some answers can´t be spoken. I believe that material, form and colour have their own language that cannot be translated." (Cat. Thomas Schütte. London 1998, p. 22).

Opposites lie very close together in Schütte's work, indeed they are mutually dependent, the one not being able exist without the other: sincerity goes hand in hand with bluntness. A witty joke with bitter irony.  Aesthetic beauty with social comment. Form with content. Thomas Schütte's vocabulary of forms, his materials and his themes, differ vastly, too: he is a sculptor, etcher, draughtsman and builder of architectural models rolled into one.  Steel, bronze, wood, clay, wax, plasticine, expanded polystyrene, plaster of Paris, ceramic and aluminium are the sculptor Schütte's first choice of materials, and it goes without saying that he combines natural and synthetic materials just as readily as he jumps from one artistic genre to another.