“I try to see one thing from five different viewpoints.” In Thomas Schütte’s universe, intimate watercolors, monumental figurative sculptures, vivid ceramics, architectural models, and fully realized buildings stand side-by-side as inquiries into aesthetics, history, and culture. This exhibition, the most comprehensive in the United States of Schütte’s career, explores the dazzling variety of his work and locates the through lines that can connect a bunker to a bust.

Schütte considers his subjects and selects his materials while contextualizing them in a time and place: Germany at the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st. Since his student days at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Schütte has approached art with a critical eye. Exploring, then rejecting, Minimal and Conceptual art, his work “brought the story in again.” These stories encompass the personal and the historical. Schütte’s work challenges established artistic norms by revitalizing genres rooted in past traditions and making them relevant in the present and for the future.