Thomas Schütte. Genealogies

Unclassifiable and multi-faceted, Thomas Schütte’s takes an unsettling and ironic look at the human condition, blending techniques and genres. His sculptures, architectural models, photographs, drawings and engravings have since the late 1970s formed a constantly evolving oeuvre that, in the artist's own words, aims to "introduce a distorted question mark into the world".

The exhibition explores the flow of motifs in the artist's major works, from the 1970s to the present day. Centred around the exceptional group of works belonging to the Pinault Collection (almost fifty sculptures) and accompanied by loans from the artist, as well as around a hundred works on paper, many of which have never been displayed before, the exhibition retraces, in a non-chronological way, the emergence of the forms and their variations, and compares them with the German artist's practice of drawing, watercolour and printmaking.

Caricatured, sometimes mishandled, always poignant, Schütte's figures – the central subject of the works in the Pinault Collection – come to life in clay, wax, ceramics, glass, steel or bronze, as full-length portraits or as heads of character, while remaining anchored in his drawing. Reconciling violence and ingenuity, intimacy and theatricality, seriousness and humour, the artist's singular universe has earned him a major role in contemporary art.