Großer Frauenkopf

The Frauenköpfe [Women’s Heads] form a territory of their own in Thomas Schütte’s work. While his male char­acters are always underpinned by complex, critical reflec­tions on the ills besetting humanity, his female portraits seem to exist outside of everything, detached from the turpitudes of everyday life. The scale of these female faces also plays a role in the way we apprehend them, as in Großer Frauenkopf, a soft, calm face in pale green glaze, in massive dimensions. With her closed eyes and thin eyelids, as if in meditation, she is simultaneously evocative of a sculp­ture by Maillol and the Buddhist tradition, underlining Schütte’s undeniable admiration for the feminine face of humanity, and its hybridization in the direc­tion of myth.