Thomas Schütte
Frauen (Women)
September 21, 2013–January 12, 2014
Museum Folkwang
Museumsplatz 1
45128 Essen
Germany
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10am–6pm;
Friday 10am–10:30pm
T + 49 201 8845 000
Thomas Schütte is regarded as one of the world’s most important contemporary sculptors. For many years, he has maintained a productive association with Museum Folkwang and Essen.
Organised in close cooperation with the artist, the exhibition Frauen presents a magisterial, central body of works by Schütte. The series of 18 large sculptures in bronze, steel and aluminium, which Thomas Schütte produced between 1998 and 2006, is exhibited in Museum Folkwang in its entirety for the very first time in Germany.
It demonstrates that today, following detours into abstract sculpture and object art, there is no sculptor who is as exceptional as Thomas Schütte in picking up the extensive European tradition of figurative sculpture, from the archaic right up to Rodin and Maillol. He has mastered this endeavour with confidence and perfection. Some of the reclining, crouching and upright figures recall classic female nudes, yet others are deformed to such an extent that the female forms can hardly be recognised. Mounted on steel tables, these forms are representations of the human body in changing physical and emotional states.
Also shown are two groups of ceramic studies made between 1997 and 1999, some of which form the basis for Schütte’s subsequent work on the Frauen sculptures and a group of drawings from the series Deprinotes (2006–2008).
A catalogue in German and English is published by Richter & Fey Verlag, Düsseldorf to accompany the exhibition.
The exhibition Thomas Schütte – Frauen is supported by NATIONAL-BANK Aktiengesellschaft.
