Thomas Schütte at the Bernier-Eliades
Award-winning artist Thomas Schütte follows his widely successful MoMA exhibtion with a solo show at the Bernier-Eliades Gallery. In Thomas Schütte’s world, delicate watercolors, towering figurative sculptures, vibrant ceramics, architectural models, and fully constructed buildings coexist as explorations of aesthetics, history, and culture. The Bernier-Eliades exhibition showcases the remarkable diversity of his work. Schütte has always approached his art with a critical eye. Exploring, then rejecting, Minimal and Conceptual art, his ‘stories’ encompass the personal and the historical, challenging established artistic norms by revitalizing genres rooted in past traditions and making them relevant in the present and for the future.
The Bernier/Eliades Gallery presents the 8th solo exhibition of Thomas Schütte in Athens, following the artist’s successful exhibition at MoMA. Thomas Schütte employs a vast range of disciplines, materials, techniques, and forms, which makes his work adaptable and diverse. For this exhibition, Schütte has created a series of new artworks that reflect his own exploration of artistic, personal, cultural, and political perspectives.
The essence of Schütte’s work is both hybrid and contradictory, raising fundamental questions about its structure. Drawing inspiration from ancient Greek and Roman statuary, early modernist sculpture, and postmodern architecture, his practice moved away from minimalism and conceptualism towards narrative and figuration, adopting a richly material approach often perceived as ironic and critical. He believes that form, material, and color possess their own language, that cannot be translated. Central to Schütte’s work is the human figure within its sociopolitical context, including the role of artists and artworks in everyday life.
Born in 1954 in Germany, Thomas Schütte studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and lives and works in Düsseldorf. He has received numerous awards, including the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale (2005), the Kurt Schwitters Prize for Fine Arts of the Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung (1998), and the Kunstpreis der Stadt Wolfsburg (1996).
His work is held in prominent international collections such as the ARC Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; the Clark Art Institute, Massachusetts; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the MoMA, New York; the Pinault Collection – Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana, Venice; and Tate Modern, London. Thomas Schütte has recently held solo exhibitions at MoMA, New York, US (2024); Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin, Germany (2021); Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2016); Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland (2013-2014); Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany (2013); and the Serpentine Gallery, London, UK (2012).
When: Opening reception on Saturday, November 16, 2024, 12:00 – 21:00 with the presence of the artist. Exhibition duration until March 4, 2025
The gallery is open Tuesday – Friday: 11:00 – 18:30 | Saturday: 12:00 – 16:00
Where: Bernier-Eliades Gallery, Eptachalkou 11, 11851 Athens
