Thomas Schutte
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. 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.
If you own a work by Thomas Schutte
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 costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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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.