Thomas Schütte

Frauen

Frauen was Thomas Schütte’s (b. 1954) first private exhibition in the Nordic countries.

The exhibition included sculptures from the Frauen series (1999–2011), ceramic figurines (1999) and watercolours from the Deprinotes series (2006–08). The Frauen series comprises altogether 18 different female figures cast in steel, bronze and aluminium, all of which were exhibited in the Sara Hildén Art Museum. The larger-than-life sculptures portray female torsos that have undergone a violent metamorphosis. Each of them rests on a large iron base, which constitutes an essential element of the sculpture. The series makes a statement about the history of Western sculpture, but at the same time it is powerfully autobiographical and personal. Schütte takes the nude female body as his subject contorting the classical sculptural forms into violently twisted postures with amputated limbs. His treatment of the materials also varies, for example in terms of colour and surface finish.

The large sculptures have been modelled on smaller spontaneously created ceramic figures. As a pliable material, clay is an ideal medium for the expression of transient emotions. The figurines form a selection of the artist’s fantasies of pin-up girls figures compressed into almost unrecognizable minimalistic flat shadow-like forms. Some of these numerous ceramic figures have ended up as prototypes of the large sculptures in the Frauen series.

The works in the Frauen exhibition were borrowed from the artist’s own collection,Stiftung Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf and the Friedrich Christian Flick collection in Berlin. The exhibition had been mounted in spring 2012 at the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, where it was curated by the then director of the museum Andrea Bellini and Dr. Dieter Schwarz, Director of Kunstmuseum Winterthur in Switzerland in close cooperation with the artist.