Thomas Sch�tte: United Enemies takes the artist's sculptural works from the past two decades as its starting point. The heavy bronze giants in United Enemies (2011), originate in small hastily sculptured ?gures with heads of modelling clay, created almost twenty years earlier. The book is richly illustrated and presents the sculptures, along with a selection of the artist's works on paper and architectural models. In his works he explores transformations of scale, and the intimate and personal is juxtaposed with the monumental and authoritarian. The main essay by Bente Larsen, Professor in Art History at the University of Oslo, focuses on the fragmented body and how this aesthetical and philosophical concept relates to Thomas Sch�tte's work.
A single potato chip on a matchbox, larger-than-life figurative sculptures polished to a gleam: Thomas Schütte's category-defying oeuvre gives form to the incongruences of the world we inhabit The Düsseldorf-based sculptor, draftsman, model maker and sometime architect Thomas Schütte works in scales ranging from small to monumental. Rooted in minimal and conceptual art, his work addresses history, art history, modes of meaning and how art can function in the world. Published in conjunction with the first museum retrospective of Schütte's work in the United States in over 20 years, this eponymous monograph presents a holistic overview of his career from 1975 to the present. Taking aesthetics, form and history as its focus, the publication features over 100 sculptures, drawings, prints and experiments in architecture, alongside revelatory archival materials. Curator Paulina Pobocha has worked in close collaboration with Schütte since 2015, and has had complete access to his archives, as well as the myriad drawings and notebooks still in his possession. Excerpts from these papers are published for the first time in this catalog. Additionally, essays by Pobocha, Jennifer Allen and André Rottmann provide historical and theoretical pathways into the complexity of Schütte's oeuvre, and contributions by artists Marlene Dumas and Charles Ray reflect on Schütte's significance through close readings of his work. Thomas Schütte (born 1954) studied under Gerhard Richter and Fritz Schwegler at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He has participated in Documenta, Skulptur Projekte Münster and the Venice Biennale, where he was awarded the Golden Lion in 2005. His work can be found in the collections of major institutions across Europe and North America.
Since the early 1980's, Thomas Schütte--a three-times participant in the documenta in Kassel, winner of the 2010 Düsseldorf Art Prize, and best individual artist at the 2005 Venice Biennale--has worked on architectural models, scenes, and figurative scenarios. Replete with notes on relative dimensions or accompanied by small figures, they correspond to the realization on a larger scale, with many originally small models having been converted into large-scale works over time. The interplay between the small and the large, between the model and its realization, and between the notions of art as a model and the models as art are recurring themes throughout Thomas Schütte's oeuvre. He both instigated the publication of this voluminous book about the show in Bonn and laid down its specific detail, so there is scarcely a single group of works missing from this chronological survey of the past thirty years. The model itself is not just the nucleus of both a fantastical oeuvre, but takes on a more seismographic function and rediscovers the architectural arts on behalf of fine art.
Thomas Schtte's first scale models in the 1980s presented rooms to live and work. While the atelier houses reflect the artist's own activity, the symbolic forms for bunkers, which reveal Schtte's sceptical view of things and his black humour, offer security and a place of retreat.Twenty years later, Schtte once again took up imaginary model architecture with light pavilions made out of wood and leftovers from his atelier, commercial buildings like petrol stations or car parks, as well as concert halls and event locations.While the first models remain rooted in a fictional world, the models of the One Man Houses from 2003 on were converted into reality.In 2007 he built a house for two French collectors, and in 2009 - following the Ferienhaus fr Terroristen - a pavilion-like house with glass walls as a possible design for new architecture as well as an oppositional praxis in our society.This publication provides a comprehensive survey of the architectural models from the first years to today's design projects.English and German text.
Art and Design in 1960s New York explores the mutual influence between fine art and graphic design in New York City during the long decade of the 1960s. Beginning with advertising's "creative revolution" and its relationship to pop artists, the book traces design and art's developing interest in responses to civic problems such as the proliferation of billboards, navigation through the city's streets and subways, and issues of deteriorating infrastructure. The strategies exploited by these artists and designers resulted in similar approaches to visual imagery and shared techniques for thinking about and responding to the city in which they lived.
