Thomas Schutte valuation
Big Spirits, Ceramic Sketches and architectural models — sculpture that keeps changing its mind about scale.
Thomas Schutte was born in Oldenburg in 1954 and studied under Gerhard Richter at Dusseldorf.
What a work by Thomas Schutte is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Thomas Schutte was born in Oldenburg in 1954 and studied under Gerhard Richter at Dusseldorf. He works deliberately without a signature style, moving between architectural models for buildings that will not be built, small figures under glass, enormous distorted bronze Grosse Geister, ceramic heads, steel women lying on steel tables, and watercolours made daily. The refusal to settle is the position: he has said the model and the monument interest him equally, and much of the work sits between the two, at a scale that is neither a maquette nor a public sculpture. He won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2005.
The large bronzes lead this market and exist in small editions; cast number, foundry and patina are the substance of a valuation, and the surfaces are frequently patinated in unusual colours that must not be restored conventionally. Ceramic works are unique, fragile and prone to firing cracks that are original. The architectural models incorporate wood, foam and mixed materials and have their own conservation problems. Watercolours and etchings are numerous and are the accessible part of the output, and Schutte produces them in quantity.
Düsseldorf, the Fourth Plinth and MoMA
Schütte studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf from 1973 to 1981, alongside Katharina Fritsch, under Gerhard Richter, Fritz Schwegler, Daniel Buren and Benjamin Buchloh. He has taken part in documenta in Kassel three times, and in 2007 his Model for a Hotel, a 21-storey building in yellow, blue and red glass weighing more than eight tonnes, stood on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square.
The Dia Art Foundation in New York showed a survey of his work in three parts between 1998 and 2000, the Serpentine showed Faces and Figures in 2012, and the Museum of Modern Art gave him a retrospective from September 2024 to January 2025. He lives and works in Düsseldorf.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
