Influential German Sculptor Thomas Schütte Gets a MoMA Retrospective

New York’s Museum of Modern Art has revealed its biggest show for the fall season: a Thomas Schütte retrospective featuring more than 100 works by the influential German sculptor.

Curated by Paulina Pobocha, who recently left MoMA’s painting and sculpture department to become senior curator of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the show will survey the whole of Schütte’s five-decade career. It will also shine a light on some of the lesser-seen sides of his oeuvre, including his drawings and prints.

The exhibition presents an unusual curatorial challenge, in that Schütte has exhibited no signature style across his many years of working. An interest in German history has shown up regularly, as has a fascination with architectural models and public monuments, but the look and themes of Schütte’s work have changed with some degree of frequency.

In a phone interview, Pobocha said the unclassifiable nature of Schütte’s output spurred her to do the exhibition in the first place.

“Every time I came across his work before we started working together, it was quite different,” she said. “The more and more I came in contact with the lesser-known aspects of his practice, I was a little befuddled. These look like they could’ve been made by three different people, but they’re of course by one person.”

She continued, “He’s looking into longstanding art-historical genres and playing with them, upending them. The show and all this work is more connected by an attitude than an aesthetic.” That attitude, she said, could be described as “highly critical, but also very curious.”

US audiences have never seen a Schütte exhibition so big as the one due to open at MoMA on September 29. And not since a three-part Dia Art Foundation exhibition staged in New York between 1998 and 2000 has the artist had such a major institutional show in the country.

That means his reputation in this country has lagged behind his following abroad. In 2005, Schütte won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale; he has figured in three editions of the Documenta quinquennial in Kassel, Germany.

When he was a student at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf during the ’70s, Schütte studied with artist Gerhard Richter and art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. Schütte is considered a pivotal figure in the transition away from Minimalism, with many of his smaller-scale, humbler objects countering that movement’s emphasis on grandness.

His most widely seen works include his “United Enemies” series, a group of sculptures begun in the early 1990s in which people with gnarled faces are shown bound together, their bodies sometimes fusing in the process. The figures are puppet-like, and when shown in public, they seem like half-completed monuments.

But Pobocha said she was most excited to display works from Schütte’s Kunstakademie days, when he was dialoguing with ideas brought forward by fellow pupils—Gerhard Richter, for one—and then subverting them. She described these Schütte works, and others by him, as being imbued with an unusual sense of humor.

“There’s an intense seriousness to what he’s doing, but there’s also so much humor,” Pobocha said. “It’s a deadpan humor—sometimes the humor is dark, but sometimes, there’s also a levity in his work. That’s something I’m trying to bring to the surface.”