Forms, boundaries, precarious existences: Thomas Schütte, born in 1954 in Oldenburg, Germany, takes center stage in Punta della Dogana’s 2025 exhibition season with a show that traces his decades-long artistic journey – elusive yet eclectic, eloquent yet untethered – a career marked by constant evolution and exploration of diverse styles, techniques, and materials. In addition to a selection of sculptural works from the Pinault Collection, the solo exhibition, curated by Camille Morineau and Jean-Marie Gallais, features numerous loans and previously unseen works, including prints and drawings. These pieces collectively demonstrate Schütte’s reflective versatility, presented in a non-chronological narrative. The starting point of the German artist’s vision remains the human form—a grotesque, alienated figure, mocked and violated, profoundly unsettling yet strikingly ironic and engaging. This figure stands out through its interaction with inanimate matter and form, simultaneously underscoring the fragile state of existence. The exhibition thus invites visitors not only to reconstruct Schütte’s artistic process but also to rethink the relationships within art itself.

Featured image: Thomas Schütte, Efficiency Men, 2005. Installation view at Punta della Dogana, 2011
© Palazzo Grassi, ph. Fulvio Orsenigo © Thomas Schütte, by SIAE 2024