Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. Thomas Schütte is not the artist you think you know. This German from Düsseldorf, born in 1954, has created a body of work that constantly eludes you, precisely at the moment you think you have grasped it. He is a deliberate chameleon, a silent provocateur who hides behind his monumental sculptures while mocking the conventions you cherish so much.
First, let’s stop the usual intellectual masturbation. Schütte is the student of Gerhard Richter – yes, THAT Richter – but unlike his master who locked himself in his conceptual ivory tower, our man enjoys playing with forms, materials, scales, like a brilliant child… no, sorry, like a BRILLIANT child who found a way to transform his Play-Doh into a sharp commentary on our time.
His series “United Enemies” expresses everything I love about his work. Small pathetic figures with deformed faces, attached together under glass bells like laboratory specimens. These powerless bureaucrats, these politicians at the end of their careers, these mismatched couples but condemned to coexist remind you of something? Well done! It’s us! It’s our dysfunctional society! It’s the marriage of convenience between East and West after the fall of the Wall, it’s your own divided inner life! Schütte doesn’t need to tell us, he shows us, and the metaphor is all the more powerful because it is never explicit.
Let’s linger for a moment on Schütte’s relationship with existentialist philosophy, particularly that of Jean-Paul Sartre. Schütte’s work is imbued with existential anxiety, but unlike the lyrical abstraction that followed the Second World War, he confronts this anguish with a caustic black humor. “Hell is other people,” wrote Sartre in No Exit [1]. And what does Schütte do? He literalizes this phrase by attaching two figures to each other, like prisoners condemned to perpetuity. His “United Enemies” are the very embodiment of the Sartrean concept of the objectifying gaze, where the presence of the other transforms us into an object, freezes us in an essence we have not chosen.
This gaze that turns us into a thing, Schütte turns it back on us in his monumental busts and ceramic heads. Grotesque heads, deformed faces that stare at us with their empty gaze, eerily reminiscent of the expressive heads of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, that Austrian sculptor who cataloged human expressions in the 18th century. The reference is not fortuitous: like Messerschmidt who sought to capture the “spirit of the time” through his “character heads,” Schütte offers us a psychological portrait of our time [2]. His “Ceramic Sketches” are like psychoanalytic studies modeled in clay, where each facial deformation translates a contemporary neurosis.
But philosophy is only one of the prisms for approaching this protean work. Let’s move on to the theater, because yes, Schütte is fundamentally a man of the theater who has never set foot on a stage.
Schütte’s work is profoundly theatrical, but of a theater that owes more to Samuel Beckett than to Shakespeare. His figures are tragic actors frozen in uncomfortable postures, as if waiting for a Godot who will never come. Take “Mann im Matsch” (Man in the Mud), that pathetic figure sunk up to the knees in a muddy base. Isn’t that Estragon or Vladimir, condemned to immobility while maintaining a dignified posture? Or Winnie in “Happy Days,” buried up to the waist and then up to the neck, but continuing her monologue as if nothing had happened? As Martin Esslin writes in his definition of the theater of the absurd, “this theater expresses the feeling that the fundamental certainties and presumptions of the previous era have been swept away, that they have lost their validity.” [3]
Schütte’s approach is perfectly Beckettian: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” [4] He presents us with failure as a fundamental human condition, but a failure that retains a strange dignity. His characters are never simply pathetic; they retain a kind of nobility in their deformity, as if their resistance to conventional aesthetics were a form of moral courage.
Schütte’s architectural models recall Beckett’s minimalist sets: spaces reduced to the essential, dystopian, where the characters are trapped. His “Model for a Museum” looks more like a crematorium than a place of culture. His “Schutzraum” (Shelter) is a space of protection that protects nothing. As in “Endgame,” architecture becomes a metaphor for our condition: we are locked in structures that we ourselves have created, but which offer us no comfort.
This theatricality is reinforced by his way of playing with scales. By producing architectural models that will never be built (or that will be, but only as sculptures), he transforms the viewer into Gulliver, sometimes a giant overlooking a miniature world, sometimes a Lilliputian crushed by monumental figures. It is a constant power play, where the viewer is continually destabilized, like the spectator of a Pirandello play who no longer knows whether they are in or out of the fiction.
What I like about Schütte is his stubborn refusal of heroism. Unlike so many other German sculptors like Josef Thorak or Arno Breker who served Nazi ideology by creating idealized, muscular, triumphant figures, Schütte creates anti-heroes, defeated, hesitant characters. His version of “Vater Staat” (Father State) is not an impressive colossus but a figure wrapped in an oversized coat, without arms, like a phantom of power rather than its manifestation.
This subversion of public monuments is one of the most political aspects of his work. In Germany, a country where monuments have played such a controversial role in the construction of national identity, producing anti-monuments is a profoundly subversive act. Schütte does not merely criticize the aesthetics of monumentality; he reinvents what a monument can be in the post-ideological era.
If we compare Schütte to another great contemporary sculptor, Anish Kapoor, the difference is striking. Kapoor creates seductive, sensual objects that aspire to a kind of mystical transcendence. Schütte, on the other hand, constantly brings us back down to earth, to the mud. There is no elevation, no sublimation, only a brutal confrontation with our earthly condition.
Schütte’s “Frauen” (Women), those monumental sculptures in bronze and steel representing feminine nudes, are particularly striking. Unlike traditional odalisques, these women are not there for our visual pleasure. Their deformed bodies, strange proportions, and uncomfortable postures resist all eroticization. They evoke Willem de Kooning’s women, except that in Schütte, the violence is not in the painterly gesture but in the very twisting of the form.
That’s where Schütte’s twisted genius lies: he uses the noble materials of classical sculpture – bronze, steel, ceramic – but to create forms that defy the tradition they represent. As if Praxiteles had suddenly decided to sculpt deformed beings instead of Olympian gods.
And then there’s this obsession with binary figures: “United Enemies,” “Mann und Frau,” always mismatched couples, improbable duos. Isn’t this a metaphor for our own inner duality? Of that fundamental division between what we are and what we pretend to be? Between our impulses and our moral principles? Freud would have loved these sculptures that so perfectly materialize the conflict between the id and the superego, leaving the poor ego struggling in the middle.
Let’s move on to something else: his relationship with matter. I love the way Schütte manipulates his materials. There is something almost tactile, sensual in his way of working with clay, wood, metal. His fingerprints remain visible in his small modeling paste models, as if to remind us that behind these monumental works, there is always the hand of a man, fallible, imperfect. It is a high-level craftsmanship that never seeks to hide its own weaknesses.
Unlike Jeff Koons who produces objects of aseptic industrial perfection, Schütte allows the process, the struggle with matter to appear. His sculptures bear the trace of their manufacture, like the pentimenti in a Rembrandt painting. They show us that creation is a struggle, not a serial production.
What also strikes me about Schütte is that he is deeply German while escaping the clichés of “German art.” He has neither the expressionist heaviness of a Baselitz nor the conceptual austerity of a Kiefer. He creates instead a visual language that dialogues with the history of German art while constantly subverting it.
His series “Krieger” (Warriors) is the perfect example. These military figures, with grossly modeled faces, wearing bottle cap helmets with pointed tips, turn the entire Prussian militarist tradition into derision. They recall the expressionist sculptures of Ernst Barlach, but emptied of their pathos, reduced to almost comical caricatures. Schütte demystifies military heroism without falling into moralizing discourse. He simply shows the absurdity and ridiculousness where others would see only greatness and tragedy.
There is something profoundly liberating in this approach. In a country where the weight of history is so crushing, Schütte finds a way to address it that is neither in denial nor in self-flagellation. He creates a critical distance that allows us to see German history with lucidity but without being paralyzed by it.
It is perhaps for this reason that his work resonates so strongly today, at a time when so many countries are forced to reexamine their own past. Schütte shows us that it is possible to confront history without drowning in it, to create an art that recognizes the traumas of the past while turning towards the future.
I think of his sculpture “Großer Respekt” (Great Respect), where tiny human figures venerate a statue placed on an exaggeratedly elevated pedestal. It is a masterful satire of our relationship to monuments, of our need for heroes and figures of authority. Schütte makes us aware of our own smallness in the face of the symbolic constructions that we ourselves have erected.
What I like most about Schütte is his refusal to tell us what to think. Unlike so many contemporary artists who highlight their political message with a fluorescent marker, he lets his works radiate with ambiguity. They are open to interpretation, they resist any univocal reading. As the philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote, “Art does not consist in putting forward alternatives, but in resisting, through form and nothing else, the course of the world which continues to threaten men like a pistol pressed against their chest.” [5]
This does not mean that Schütte is apolitical, far from it. All his work is traversed by a reflection on power, authority, collective memory. But he understands that the most politically powerful art is often that which does not present itself as such, that which transforms our perception rather than assigning us a message.
Ultimately, what Schütte offers us is a form of resistance. Resistance to standardization, to homogenization, to simplification. In a world that values perfection, efficiency, functionality, he creates deliberately imperfect, inefficient, dysfunctional objects. And it is precisely this resistance that makes his art a liberating force.
So yes, some of you will tell me that Schütte has become an integral part of the system he criticizes. That his works sell for a fortune at Christie’s, that he is collected by all the major museums, that he has become a safe value on the art market. It’s true. But his work retains, despite everything, a radical strangeness, a capacity to disorient us, to make us see the world differently.
And that is perhaps, ultimately, the ultimate test for a great artist: not his ability to shock or please, but his ability to durably transform our perception. Schütte passes this test with flying colors. After seeing his works, you will never look at a public monument, a figure of authority, or even your own reflection in the mirror in the same way again.
So the next time you find yourself in front of a sculpture by Thomas Schütte, take the time to really stop there. Let yourself be destabilized. Accept being uncomfortable. Because it is precisely in this discomfort that the power of his art resides.
- Sartre, Jean-Paul. No Exit, Gallimard, 1947.
- Belting, Hans. Face and Mask: A Double History, Princeton University Press, 2017.
- Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd, Vintage Books, 1961.
- Beckett, Samuel. Worstward Ho, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991.
- Adorno, Theodor W. Notes on Literature, Flammarion, 1984.
