16 April – 30 May 2015
Opening Reception: Thursday, 16 April, 6–8 pm
Peter Freeman, Inc., is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Thomas Schütte, one of the most acclaimed artists of his generation. This is the first time new work by Schütte has been exhibited in New York since his previous solo show with the gallery in 2012.
Schütte works across various media to explore themes of historical memory, inner struggle, and the striving for an impossible utopian ideal. His mastery of gesture, material, and shifts in scale are evident throughout his oeuvre, regardless of the medium he chooses.
The current exhibition focuses on new ceramics—Eierköpfe [Eggheads] (2014)—20 of which will be on view, along with two larger ceramic heads of a man and a woman from 2011. Exhibited together, these two bodies of ceramic work show Schütte playing with, on one hand, the idea of serial reproduction with the 20 similarly-shaped Eierköpfe (each variant nonetheless completely unique) and extreme figurative expressiveness on the other.
Schütte’s engagement with ceramics has been ongoing since 1989, when he first used the material for Zwei schwarze Zitronen [Black Lemons] included in his 1990 Kunsthalle Bern exhibition, scattered throughout that space. With the endless variations possible in first the shaping of the clay, then the firing and glazing, this medium allows for vastly divergent results, lending itself to the type of multiplicity and paradox that makes Schütte’s oeuvre so rich.
Also on view will be 21 large banners printed with images from Schütte’s Wattwanderung [Low Tide Wandering] series of 139 etchings, which began as a diaristic project in 2001, and from which the artist selected these 30 images. While the entire group of 139 etchings was on view at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2012 as part of the exhibition “Print Out,” these 30 banners have been shown only once before--at Musée de Grenoble in 2003--and are being shown in New York now for the first time since then.
Schütte has recently had solo exhibitions at Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland (2013-2014), Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany (2013), and Serpentine Gallery, London (2012), and his work has been the focus of three different recent retrospectives held in Bonn (2010), Madrid (2010), and Munich (2009). His work is included in the permanent collections of major international museums including: Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Reina Sofia, Madrid; Tate, London; Dallas Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Schütte was born in 1954 in Oldenburg, Germany; he lives and works in Düsseldorf.
A reception for the artist will be held Thursday 16 April from 6 to 8 pm. For reproduction requests, interviews with the artist and general inquiries, please contact the gallery at 212-966-5154 or info@peterfreemaninc.com.
