THOMAS SCHÜTTE: MAJOR SCULPTURES

Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition of monumental sculptures by Thomas Schütte in New York.

January 22 - February 22, 2025

Schütte’s multivalent practice incorporates painting, drawing, printmaking, architectural model making, and sculpture. Having emerged as an artist after the development of Conceptual art and rejecting that movement’s attempted refusal of the body, Schütte uses the human figure as a means of inquiry into aesthetics and culture, often with a sardonic, critical stance toward tradition. Among his most ambitious and provocative series, Frauen is a sequence of eighteen works made between 1998 and 2006.

The poses, stylization, and materiality of the Frauen vary widely. Reclining, sitting, crouching, and hanging off the sides of their table-like pedestals, the figures are transformed and amended by pose and sculptural gesture, radical explorations of the human body as perceived and imagined.

The Frauen engage with the classical and neoclassical traditions of the reclining female nude. They relate as well as to the revisitations of and challenges to the subject by artists including Aristide Maillol, Henri Matisse, and Henry Moore, and to Cubist and Futurist innovations in sculpture by Pablo Picasso and Umberto Boccioni. Schütte’s works emphasize both figuration—embodying human anatomy and agency—and abstraction, dramatizing the malleability of their mediums.

Torso is a related work in polished bronze at the same scale as the six exhibited Frauen. Its arcing, prone form is ringed by smooth, bulging folds similar to those of the Große Geister (Big Spirits) series that Schütte made between 1995 and 2004.