In addition to sculptures and installations, Thomas Schütte’s oeuvre also encompasses watercolours, models, paintings and etchings. Schütte was part of the new generation of German sculptors who, from the 1980s onwards, distanced themselves from minimal and conceptual art. Just like figures such as Reinhardt Mucha, Hubert Kiecol and Harald Klingelhöller, he developed a postmodern practice in which allusions to art and architectural history were punctuated with a healthy dose of relativisation vis-à-vis the modernistic sculptural ideal.
Schütte chose to pursue art after visiting Documenta V at the age of eighteen. He studied under figures such as Gerhard Richter in Düsseldorf, where he made his first paintings based on photos. A little later, he worked in a “decorative painting style in the spirit of Niele Toroni and Daniel Buren”. We can see Schütte’s ‘Guirlandes’ and ‘Collections’ from the late 1970s and early 80s in this context: brightly coloured, abstract motifs as minimal pseudo-decorations on the wall. The works display a strong sense of eclecticism and a mentality of non-linear thought and action, the seeds of the later work.
Schütte explored a more functional approach in his ‘Architectural Models’ from the early 1980s. The models of fictitious architectural constructions are a critique of the “intellectual poverty of much postmodern architecture”. Since the mid-1980s, Schütte has regularly painted watercolours. Although the human figure plays a central role in these, in terms of style they are highly diverse and often have an ironic undertone. Schütte himself regards the works as sketches for other projects, although he stamps and dates them so as to confer the status of an archive or collection.
Schütte extended his fascination for the human figure into his sculptures and devoted his energies to probing human psychology and forms of behaviour. His sculptural work became more monumental in the second half of the 1980s. From that point onwards, Schütte created human figures that are so severely deformed they are completely divorced from the classical idea of figurative sculpture. They depict various states of emotional and/or physical depression.
In the 1990s, Schütte continued to elaborate his socio-psychological probing of human behaviour, and he dramatically expanded his sculptural work in terms of material, technique and form. In general, much of Schütte’s work reflects the human psychology of his age – from the nihilistic 1980s to the individualistic 1990s and up to the present day – invariably with an undertone that ranges from irony to a performative, almost absurdist despair.
