Thomas Schütte

Peter Freeman is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Thomas Schütte. It is his first solo exhibition in Paris since La Monnaie de Paris in 2019 and his first with our Parisian gallery since 2012. Thomas Schütte’s multifaceted oeuvre offers a profound reflection on themes of cultural memory, existential struggle, and the fraught power of monuments and memorials. Working in a variety of mediums, including sculpture, architecture, printmaking, and drawing, Schütte constructs real and invented forms that range from fantastical creatures and towering abstractions of humanoids to imposing busts of famous, forgotten, or anonymous figures. His otherworldly beings, vividly colored ceramics, and modelled clay figurines belie the artist’s characteristic skepticism and dark humor. This exhibition features new figurative sculptures including the bronze Mother Earth (2024/2025), a larger version of which is currently on display at the Punta della Dogana in Venice. Evoking a mythical queen or fairytale character, Schütte’s latest female form is inspired by the small figurines found from a traditional Dreikönigskuchen [King Cake]. While the original Dreikönigskuchen figure is relatively flattened, the volume and solidity of Mother Earth lends her an air of stability and authority. Her male counterpoint is found in König Nr. 7 (2025), another imposing columnar figure rendered to the same scale in blue-grey glazed ceramic. Together, the status of these hieratic figures is uncertain: they seem to exist somewhere between royal and religious, threatening and benevolent. Other new ceramic works include a series of serpentine forms mounted on rectangular bases titled Aus der Weihnachtsbäckerei [Christmas bakery] in reference to the classic German Christmas carol In der Weihnachtsbäckerei by Rolf Zuckowski. True to Schütte’s practice of working and re-working the same motifs and imagery with a range of materials, these snake-like forms are echoed in a number of recent drawings that are also on view. There is also a new iteration of Schütte’s United Enemies, a series of old man characters that the artist first developed in 1992. The theatrical faces of these hand-sized figurines are modelled in Fimo clay, while their bodies are formed by three wooden sticks wrapped in scraps of fabrics. The latest “enemies” is exhibited here as Schütte’s Old Friends Revisited, an appropriate name for the archetypal figures that straddle a fragile line between individual likeness and commonality. The artist’s exhibited work extends beyond the gallery walls to the nearby garden of the Palais-Royal with the presentation of Letzter Geist [Last Ghost] (2025), a new bronze that continues Schütte’s exploration of his Geister forms. Commonly translated as “spirits” or “ghosts,” this term refers to a body of sculptures begun in 1995 with a series of small figures that blur the boundary between figuration and abstraction. Both strange and familiar, these figures which then evolved into monumental forms, oscillate between the grotesque and the disturbing. While the Geister were initially conceived as bipedal, terrestrial beings firmly anchored to the ground, Letzter Geist takes on a more abstract form: the figure seems to curl up and rise—or be drawn—towards the sky. Thomas Schütte (b. 1954) lives in Düsseldorf. Among his numerous solo exhibitions are those at Punta della Dogana, Venice (until 23 November 2025); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2024–2025); De Pont Museum, Tilburg (2023); Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin (2022–2021); Hetjens – Deutsches Keramikmuseum, Düsseldorf (2020); Monnaie de Paris, France (2019); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2019); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2016); Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2013); and Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1999). His work has been included in recent group exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (until 8 March 2026); S.M.A.K., Belgium (2023); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany (2022); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2020–2022); and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2018). Schütte’s work is in numerous collections around the world, including at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Tate, London; Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.