Thomas Schütte

With their undulating and bulging forms these sculpture bring to mind Michelin men. The reflections on their surface make them seem without mass, empty. Thomas Schütte has called them Große Geister (Big Spirits): they are monumental apparitions which nonetheless nearly dissolve into immateriality due to the smooth, shiny quality of their surface. With sunken eyes they look about in amazement, displaced and seeking solid footing. Here Schütte investigates, as he often does in his work, the expressive potential of physical stances and facial expressions in the tradition of the nineteenth-century artist Honoré Daumier. The Große Geister have no single, fixed meaning; instead they point to the possibilities that statues, and artworks in general, still may have in terms of communication in today’s world.