Thomas Schütte – Art studies with Fritz Schwegler and Gerhard Richter
Thomas Schütte was born in Oldenburg, Germany on 16 November 1954. The son of an engineer, he travelled frequently from an early age due to his father’s profession. The artist held the resulting restlessness into later years, and was already hitchhiking through Europe at the age of 16. This unrestrained pursuit of freedom soon led him to art, and a visit to Documenta in Kassel in 1972 reinforced his decision to become an artist. After his first attempts as a draughtsman, he enrolled in the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1973 where one of his early teachers was none other than Gerhard Richter, and he received further tuition from Fritz Schwegler. During his studies, he became acquainted with his namesakes, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth, and following graduation in 1981, could already look back on his first exhibition participations as a visual artist.
Art is not craft for the artist, but handiwork
From early on, Thomas Schütte refused to be pigeonholed, and he experimented as a student with various artforms: installation, sculpture, drawing. He succeeded in freeing himself from outside influences and expectations much quicker than many other artists, demonstrating his versatility and virtuosity with great independence. As early as the 1980s, he gained notoriety from his architectural models, and it was this consistent development of these highly regarded and promising approaches that finally resulted in international recognition in the 1990s of the now celebrated artist. Thomas Schütte soon visited Documenta in Kassel again – this time not as a marvelling young visitor, but as a matured and respected participant. For Schütte, creative work is work with the hands: drawing, modelling, building – the work emerges from working with the hands, through touching, feeling and forming.
Man as the focus of creative thought and action
Thomas Schütte sees the person as the centre point of his artistic activity. In the true sense of the word, man is the crown of creation, as far as the artist’s work is concerned. Everything revolves around them, and boils down to them. At the same time, it is not about glorification, but about understanding the references that determine and shape the person, and a release of the subject from the grip of supposed reality. The sketch on which an artwork is based is more than just a model – it is a counterpart and adversary to the model that emerges from it. The charged relationship between sketch and model often becomes itself the subject of artistic discussion. Thomas Schütte has received a great number of prizes and honours for his work, including the Arnold Bode Preis at Documenta in 1990, the Kurt Schwitter Preis in 1998, the Lichtwark Preis in 2004, and the Ernst Franz Vogelmann Preis in 2014 for contemporary sculpture. His works can be found in important international art collections, for example the Art Institute of Chicago and the Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
Thomas Schütte lives and works today primarily in Düsseldorf.
Thomas Schütte - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
