Thomas Schütte

Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition of monumental sculptures by Thomas Schütte in New York. Opening on January 22 at the West 21st Street gallery, the installation includes six sculptures from the Frauen (Women) series and the related Torso (2005). The largest presentation of this historic body of work in the United States to date, the exhibition highlights its importance within the oeuvre of one of the most significant sculptors of our time.

Schütte’s multivalent practice incorporates painting, drawing, printmaking, architectural model making, and sculpture. Having emerged as an artist after the development of Conceptual art and rejecting that movement’s attempted refusal of the body, Schütte uses the human figure as a means of inquiry into aesthetics and culture, often with a sardonic, critical stance toward tradition. Among his most ambitious and provocative series, Frauen is a sequence of eighteen works made between 1998 and 2006.

The poses, stylization, and materiality of the Frauen vary widely. Reclining, sitting, crouching, and hanging off the sides of their table-like pedestals, the figures are transformed and amended by pose and sculptural gesture, radical explorations of the human body as perceived and imagined.