THOMAS SCHÜTTE was born at Oldenburg in Germany in 1954. A student of Fritz Schwegler and Gerhard Richter at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, he developed a highly versatile artistic prac tice out of minimalism and conceptual art in the early seventies. He has explored crucial issues such as power, memory, the role of art and its inadequacy to deal with the great human issues. Schütte has an anti-heroic approach to art. He rejects the Beuysian role of the artist as guide, preferring to introduce doubts and undermine certainties. “My works have the purpose of placing a crooked question mark in the world,” he has said. His artworks are frequently presented as models, architectural mock-ups or theatrical sets, provisional and imperfect, alluding with subtle irony to important political or historical and artistic issues.

Today his work principally focuses on the structures of society, with their political references and impact on the lives of individuals, laying bare the fragility and instability of contemporary political systems. His works do not always present a recognizable narrative, while revealing a concern for the figure and the human condition, as is clear from the sculptures presented at the Punta della Dogana. Head-Wicht (2006) and Good and Bad (2009) are heads in which the artist explores the expressive potential of physiognomy, while Weeping Woman (2009) is a bronze fountain representing a weeping female face, an archetypal figure in art history. These works explore states of conflict, isolation, disillusionment, despair and vulnerability, which are also echoed in his Efficiency Men (2005), spectral figures made out of thin steel spirals, wrapped in heavy blankets from which emerge three disquieting colored silicone faces. Grotesque masks of corrupt contemporary society, the three figures advance in space like prisoners in chains engaged in a forced patrol. 

Finally Vater Staat (literally “father-state”, 2010) is a bronze statue 4 meters high depicting a man with an authoritative yet frail appearance wrapped in a cloak that binds his arms.  After years devoted to his children, now he stands motionless, incapable of acting. The artist’s purpose here is neither mocking nor irreverent in spirit.  This figure of a father gazing dumbly at his children is both a metaphor of power and an allegory of impotence.

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