I try to see one thing from five different viewpoints
— Thomas Schütte
Thomas Schütte (b. 1954, Oldenburg) is a German artist whose work spans sculpture, drawing, printmaking, architecture, installation, and watercolor. Active since the late 1970s, his practice engages questions of representation, public space, cultural memory, and the role of figuration after Minimalism and Conceptual Art. Schütte occupies a distinctive position within contemporary art, combining an experimental approach to materials and scale with a sustained interest in historical sculptural forms and architectural models.
Educated at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf during a period shaped by Minimalist and Conceptual practices, Schütte developed an early critical engagement with those movements while reintroducing narrative, figuration, and imagery into his work. Architectural proposals and models form a recurring strand of his practice, functioning both as speculative designs for inhabitable structures and as reflections on social and political realities. Alongside these, Schütte has produced a wide range of figurative sculptures—from small-scale studies to monumental works—that address the instability of monuments, the vulnerability of the human figure, and the tension between individuality and archetype.
Material experimentation is central to Schütte’s work. He employs modeling clay, ceramics, bronze, glass, wood, textiles, and watercolor, often shifting between provisional and permanent materials. These material choices, combined with changes in scale and presentation, allow his works to register humor, irony, and ambiguity while avoiding fixed meanings or didactic statements.
Schütte’s work has been presented in numerous major institutional exhibitions worldwide. Recent solo exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2024–2025), De Pont Museum (2023), Georg Kolbe Museum (2021–2022), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2019), Moderna Museet (2016), Fondation Beyeler (2013), and Dia Center for the Arts (1999). A large-scale solo exhibition will be presented at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in 2026.
His work has also been included in significant group exhibitions at institutions such as the Hamburger Kunsthalle (2022), Carnegie Museum of Art (2018), Museum Ludwig (2011), the New Museum (2011), MACBA (2010), and Stedelijk Museum (2007), as well as Documenta X (1997).
Schütte’s works are held in numerous international public collections, including the Centre Pompidou, Tate, the National Gallery of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has worked with Konrad Fischer Galerie since 1981.
Schütte lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.