Artist:
Thomas Schütte
Title:
Vater Staat
Year:
2011
Adress:
Potsdamer Strasse 50
www.independent.co.uk:
The same monumentality of scale and malleability of form is seen in the centrepiece of the show, Vater Staat (Father State). The figure stands nearly four metres tall in the central atrium, a colossus in steel breathing authority in its chiselled features, capped and begowned like a North African or Central Asian dictator. Only the steel is rusting and, when you walk around it, the gown seems bodiless beneath a head and shoulders held on a hidden structure. It's both terrifying and intriguing. Around it, quite opposite in scale but equally disturbing, are 30 close-up photographs of miniature faces modelled in clay, the Innocenti from 1994. Individually, they are human and even comic in their grimaces like children's finger face masks. Together they are unnerving, threatening in their mass.
Still in his forties, a product of the Dusseldorf Kunstakademie, Schütte is in one sense a very traditional artist. Although he has, particularly in his early career, worked a lot with architectural models and design, his central concern has always been with humanity and how to represent it.
www.modernamuseet.se:
Schütte explores shifts of scale – juxtaposing the intimate and personal with the monumental. A colossal steel figure outside the museum entrance, Vater Staat (2010), observes visitors as they arrive. The key work in the exhibition – the monumental bronze sculptures United Enemies (2011) – originate in his small, sketchy figures with heads of modelling clay made nearly twenty years earlier.
Schütte often works serially. Over the years, he has built a repertoire of motifs, shapes and themes that he revisits, develops and adapts to different dimensions or unexpected materials. small three-legged figures were dressed in fabric and tied together two and two before being placed under bell jars on plinths. The figures in the new series have got down from their pedestals and turned into grotesque giants cast in one of the most tradition-laden materials in art history – bronze.
www.christies.com:
Standing high upon a jet-black plinth, the statuesque figure in Vater Staat (Father of State) exudes a calm authority over his surroundings. The figure appears wise and solemn; his features are sunken with age, his mouth is firmly set, and his deep-set eyes stare ahead stoically.
The motif of the 'Father State,' with its implications of a dictatorial head of a totalitarian regime, was one that Schütte revisited many times between 2007 and 2010.
www.spudart.org:
The sculpture of Thomas Schütte mines both his own earlier work and the art of previous eras – particularly monumnetal and memorial genres – to address the burden of traumatic history. He is primarily concerned with human condition and the effect that contemporary political structure have on the lives of individuals. In Vater Staat [which translates as 'Father State'] an imposing bronze statue towers over the viewer, immediately establishing a power dynamics within the space. The Patriarchal figure, representative of a totalitarian regime or state, is shrouded in a cloak that binds his arms, rendeing him helpless and immobile. Schütte selection of material, in this case, patinated bronze, allowed him to address the historical use of the figure as a staple of public art. Here, is in other works, the artist engaged in the tendency toward monumentality in order to subvert it – this figure is actually an antihero.
The same monumentality of scale and malleability of form is seen in the centrepiece of the show, Vater Staat (Father State). The figure stands nearly four metres tall in the central atrium, a colossus in steel breathing authority in its chiselled features, capped and begowned like a North African or Central Asian dictator. Only the steel is rusting and, when you walk around it, the gown seems bodiless beneath a head and shoulders held on a hidden structure. It's both terrifying and intriguing. Around it, quite opposite in scale but equally disturbing, are 30 close-up photographs of miniature faces modelled in clay, the Innocenti from 1994. Individually, they are human and even comic in their grimaces like children's finger face masks. Together they are unnerving, threatening in their mass.
Still in his forties, a product of the Dusseldorf Kunstakademie, Schütte is in one sense a very traditional artist. Although he has, particularly in his early career, worked a lot with architectural models and design, his central concern has always been with humanity and how to represent it.
www.modernamuseet.se:
Schütte explores shifts of scale – juxtaposing the intimate and personal with the monumental. A colossal steel figure outside the museum entrance, Vater Staat (2010), observes visitors as they arrive. The key work in the exhibition – the monumental bronze sculptures United Enemies (2011) – originate in his small, sketchy figures with heads of modelling clay made nearly twenty years earlier.
Schütte often works serially. Over the years, he has built a repertoire of motifs, shapes and themes that he revisits, develops and adapts to different dimensions or unexpected materials. small three-legged figures were dressed in fabric and tied together two and two before being placed under bell jars on plinths. The figures in the new series have got down from their pedestals and turned into grotesque giants cast in one of the most tradition-laden materials in art history – bronze.
www.christies.com:
Standing high upon a jet-black plinth, the statuesque figure in Vater Staat (Father of State) exudes a calm authority over his surroundings. The figure appears wise and solemn; his features are sunken with age, his mouth is firmly set, and his deep-set eyes stare ahead stoically.
The motif of the 'Father State,' with its implications of a dictatorial head of a totalitarian regime, was one that Schütte revisited many times between 2007 and 2010.
www.spudart.org:
The sculpture of Thomas Schütte mines both his own earlier work and the art of previous eras – particularly monumnetal and memorial genres – to address the burden of traumatic history. He is primarily concerned with human condition and the effect that contemporary political structure have on the lives of individuals. In Vater Staat [which translates as 'Father State'] an imposing bronze statue towers over the viewer, immediately establishing a power dynamics within the space. The Patriarchal figure, representative of a totalitarian regime or state, is shrouded in a cloak that binds his arms, rendeing him helpless and immobile. Schütte selection of material, in this case, patinated bronze, allowed him to address the historical use of the figure as a staple of public art. Here, is in other works, the artist engaged in the tendency toward monumentality in order to subvert it – this figure is actually an antihero.