Lot Essay
"I still think the job of the artist is to tell continuous stories with color, light, lines, form and volume. It is about developing and making work that is independent and convincing".
Thomas Schütte
The primordial, color-drenched forms of Thomas Schütte’s You Are My Sun seem to have appeared as if wrested from the Earth’s core or dropped from the sky above. Orbiting a blood-red star are autonomous, ovoid forms, each a medley of texture and color from white-hot gold to yolky yellow. Glazed by hand, the pigments are tactile and expressive as they drip, pool, and crackle across the orbs’ surfaces. The results are striking: some shine with a mirror-like finish, others are fractured, splattered, or pierced. Schütte’s attention to surface subjectivity contrasts with the arrangement of the orbs whose locations around the central, magnetic sun seem almost arbitrary; have we, the viewer, simply chanced on this orbit—this stellar position—within the celestial map? You Are My Sun is one in a larger cycle of work entitled You Are My Stars, which Schütte created in 1998.
Schütte, whose solo exhibition opens this autumn at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, has long made humor and play central elements of his practice. Initially devoted to Minimalism and Conceptual art, particularly in the wake of his studies at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademiee, the artist’s attention shifted towards more expressive traditions during the 1980s. He credits time spent exploring Rome—and by extension Italian art history—the following decade, along with the exhibition L’âme au corps at the Grand Palais, Paris, in 1994, with reorienting his approach. The latter concerned the body in its many guises throughout modernity, a theme which may have contributed to his ideas regarding fragmentation and the relationships produced therein. Schütte became interested in ideas around presence, focusing on doing “justice to the appearance of objects” (P. Tazz, “Outside in the Storms of Springtime: Thomas Schütte”, Artforum, vol. 29, no. 9 (May 1991), online). Such frameworks hold You Are My Sun in a taut equilibrium, at once unified and disparate, together and apart.
At the time that Schütte developed You Are My Stars, the relationship between part and whole occupied much of thinking. In the contemporaneous series Unem, also made of ceramic, the artist produced vases of all shapes and sizes that he then arranged in various configurations. As with You Are My Sun, each element can be appreciated individually or as part of a cohesive whole. In addition to a cohesive chromatic schema, what holds the present work together is its magical, lyrical title. That You Are My Sun calls out for narrative interpretation despite its abstract aesthetic suggests much about Schütte’s practice. Indeed, Schütte’s art demands description and anecdote. It does not exist in the realm of pure formalism. Instead, observed Adrian Searle, his art “might be seen as micro-fictions – moments rather than stories, each from a different sculpted or drawn world” (A. Searle, “Thomas Schütte: men, monsters and self-portraits”, The Guardian, 24 May 2012, online).
Thomas Schütte
The primordial, color-drenched forms of Thomas Schütte’s You Are My Sun seem to have appeared as if wrested from the Earth’s core or dropped from the sky above. Orbiting a blood-red star are autonomous, ovoid forms, each a medley of texture and color from white-hot gold to yolky yellow. Glazed by hand, the pigments are tactile and expressive as they drip, pool, and crackle across the orbs’ surfaces. The results are striking: some shine with a mirror-like finish, others are fractured, splattered, or pierced. Schütte’s attention to surface subjectivity contrasts with the arrangement of the orbs whose locations around the central, magnetic sun seem almost arbitrary; have we, the viewer, simply chanced on this orbit—this stellar position—within the celestial map? You Are My Sun is one in a larger cycle of work entitled You Are My Stars, which Schütte created in 1998.
Schütte, whose solo exhibition opens this autumn at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, has long made humor and play central elements of his practice. Initially devoted to Minimalism and Conceptual art, particularly in the wake of his studies at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademiee, the artist’s attention shifted towards more expressive traditions during the 1980s. He credits time spent exploring Rome—and by extension Italian art history—the following decade, along with the exhibition L’âme au corps at the Grand Palais, Paris, in 1994, with reorienting his approach. The latter concerned the body in its many guises throughout modernity, a theme which may have contributed to his ideas regarding fragmentation and the relationships produced therein. Schütte became interested in ideas around presence, focusing on doing “justice to the appearance of objects” (P. Tazz, “Outside in the Storms of Springtime: Thomas Schütte”, Artforum, vol. 29, no. 9 (May 1991), online). Such frameworks hold You Are My Sun in a taut equilibrium, at once unified and disparate, together and apart.
At the time that Schütte developed You Are My Stars, the relationship between part and whole occupied much of thinking. In the contemporaneous series Unem, also made of ceramic, the artist produced vases of all shapes and sizes that he then arranged in various configurations. As with You Are My Sun, each element can be appreciated individually or as part of a cohesive whole. In addition to a cohesive chromatic schema, what holds the present work together is its magical, lyrical title. That You Are My Sun calls out for narrative interpretation despite its abstract aesthetic suggests much about Schütte’s practice. Indeed, Schütte’s art demands description and anecdote. It does not exist in the realm of pure formalism. Instead, observed Adrian Searle, his art “might be seen as micro-fictions – moments rather than stories, each from a different sculpted or drawn world” (A. Searle, “Thomas Schütte: men, monsters and self-portraits”, The Guardian, 24 May 2012, online).