When Thomas Schütte made his first figurative sculpture, he discovered it couldn’t stand on its own. He might have built a simple base to anchor the feet and keep it upright, but instead Schütte melted wax in a plastic bucket and sunk the figurine up to its knees. It was a simple solution to a technical problem, but also a powerful visual metaphor. Made in 1982, Mann im Matsch (I. Version) (Man in Mud [1st Version]) was the first in what would later become a decades-long series of men and muck, realized at many scales in many materials, from modeling clay to bronze. The motif was monumentalized in 2009 with Mann im Matsch—der Suchende (Man in Mud—The Seeker), a towering sculpture permanently installed in the plaza of a bank in the artist’s birthplace of Oldenburg, Germany. Schütte transformed this symbol of inertia into one of his most generative series. The recurring figure became an example of his aptitude for leveraging the narrative possibilities of material.
Mann im Matsch was one of the first artworks Schütte created as a recent graduate of the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, where he had been enrolled since 1973. There he studied under artists Fritz Schwegler and Gerhard Richter, the art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and visiting lecturers like Richard Serra. Around this time, Schütte also became close with Konrad Fischer, whose gallery exhibited artists such as Hanne Darboven, Richard Long, Robert Ryman, and Bruce Nauman. There, and across West Germany, minimal and Conceptual art loomed large. Art could be anything now, but it didn’t always look like much. Schütte realized that “the most fashionable thing was not to do art, but to have some beams on the floor, or open the windows.” But after creating some early works in this vein—like Relais (Relay, 1979), for which he turned off the lights at Vitrine pour l’Art Actuel in Paris for one second every 30 seconds using an electrical relay—he eventually found himself missing narrative, imagery, and all the things these new artistic movements disavowed. Afterward, Schütte began to reimagine the conventions of painting, drawing, and sculpture while examining the social, political, and psychological conditions that he understood to be inextricably tied to art’s production and reception.
As with the mistake that gave rise to his figures of men stuck in mud, Schütte confronts failures and flaws unapologetically––be they the failures of artistic movements, nations, capitalism, or Western culture itself. Krieger, for example, depicts parodic soldiers that stand nearly 10 feet tall: mighty in stature but wearing bottle caps instead of helmets. Schütte’s artworks take on broad subjects and use scale and position to challenge and surprise, while offering audiences the opportunity to interpret through experience. “It’s better to have this dialogue [about art] without the scaffolding of too much theory or too much philosophy,” Schütte has said. “That makes it too heavy, you can’t stay afloat for long.” Instead, his work speaks through light, line, color, and volume—the artist’s primary tools—to tell stories of the world, big and small.
Caitlin Chaisson, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, 2025
