Multiple works installed, sculptures by Thomas Schütte

[Left to right] Thomas Schütte, Grosse Geister No. 1 (Big Spirits), 2004; Thomas Schütte, Grosse Geister No. 2 (Big Spirits), 2004
It is impossible to define Thomas Schütte's work by naming a single unifying quality or issue. On the contrary, its quirky multifariousness is what most immediately strikes one and its even more curious poise. Crazy energies seem to have sparked invention in many forms but the results have a kind of compact- ness and eidetic fixity suggesting that in each example those energies have been completely consumed by the process of finding an ultimate form. Thus iconic, table-top architectures exude a classic aura and establish a powerful sense of place that, despite their relatively makeshift construction, is out of all proportion to their actual size. The fact is that some of these buildings are quasi-anthropomorphic and one, Chinatown, actually has "façade-faces" that stick their tongues out, giving them the feel of three-dimensional parodies of Aldo Rossi's de Chirico-inspired cityscapes, albelt respectful rather than derisive, and still embody- ing the kind of enigmatic "timelessness" for which de Chirico and Rossi longed. Schütte's figurative drawings and sculptures possess many of the same traditional virtues but they have been filtered through an anomaly-prone serisibility that is too self-critical to simply make or advocate old- fashioned art in any of its conventionally "neo" styles. Thus his ceramic heads recall a host of historical precedents from Roman portraiture on down through the eighteenth-century physiognomic caprices of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. But Schütte's eccentric craftsmanship coupled with the fact that some of his waxes-typified by beady eyes and dyspeptic expres sions are known only through photographic enlargements that materially reposition the sculp- tures, oblige us to reckon with their dissimilarity not orly to reality, but to the familiar, though already uncanny works they evoke. At roughly eight feet high. Schütte's Big Spirits are the most physically imposing and disorienting of all of his work in this vein. Cast in scintillating bronze that optically dissolves internal and external contours, they resemble arrested whirlwinds with alarmingly human features: snowmen that have gone from drooping slow melt to permafrost mon- strosity; or astronauts from Pompeii. Like their miniature counterparts-they come in two sizes- these polymorphous giants call into question the scale of the rooms in which they stand as well as that of the viewer. The contortions of the works prompt Iwists and turns in the viewer's stance thereby setting off a chain reaction of contrapposto poses that orbit around the sculptures like spastic meteors around spastic moons that, in spite of their off-beat appearance, still go by the classical name "statuary."
Text written by Curator Rob Storr for the exhibition catalog.