Trio

Created in 1994, Thomas Schütte’s Trio belongs to one of the most important phases of the artist’s figural practice and presents a wry commentary on the mechanics of power. The work was included in the artist’s 1994 travelling exhibition, Figur, as well as in his celebrated 2013 solo presentation at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel. In Trio, three miniature figures stand atop a towering three-legged pedestal; every shadow, crinkle and fold of the titular group’s coverings are nimbly revealed by the detail of the bronze casting. Grandiosely elevated upon an oversized stool yet deliberately diminutive in stature, Trio formally evokes works from the artist’s acclaimed series Respekt, a cycle of work which for which Schütte sculpted groups of homeless men, elevating them as a subversive monument to the darker side of reality; together, these works function as an explicit social critique and a challenge to the conventions of the genre. That these figures border on the absurd is deliberate: as curator Lynne Cooke wrote, ‘Risking cliché… in their evocation of a Beckett-like bleakness, these monument to an otherwise undefined predicament are the product of a vision mordant and parodic in equal measure’ (L. Cooke, ‘Turning the Tables’, in Thomas Schütte: Hindsight, exh. cat., Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid 2009, p. 26). Although concerned with questions of identity, historical memory and politics, Schütte’s work does not encourage an easy interpretation. By allowing for parody, humour and the grotesque, he renders an existential angst with extraordinary pathos.

In Trio, the empathy results from Schütte’s nuanced and individualised likenesses, and portraiture, as a theme, has remained a point of enduring consideration throughout his practice. Operating within this long history, his figures disturb, rebuke and upend accepted norms. Yet, as Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist have observed, ‘Schütte’s work evades being read in terms of progression and development and is often lauded for presenting a resistance to traditional artistic values… These are works that allow the artist to create a figure “not distorted but contained within itself”. This universe of protagonists becomes a theatrum mundi, presenting both the beautiful and romantic visions of the world, as well as Stoic or dystopian interpretations’ (J. Peyton-Jones and H. Ulrich Obrist, Thomas Schütte: Faces & Figures, exh. cat., Serpentine Gallery, London 2012, p. 6). This spectacle of humanity is unmistakable in Trio, which presents a vision of the world at once harrowing and honest.