(born Oldenburg in 1954) Urns, 2-parts, 1998/1999, ceramic, yellow and blue glaze, height 83 cm, diameter 36 cm, (PS)

Provenance: Galerie Nelson-Freemann, Paris
Private Collection, North Rhine Westphalia

The urns in Thomas Schütte’s works can be seen as metaphors for words. “Vessels for formless content. Where signifier and signified separate, a phenomenon recognisable in various forms in Schütte’s entire body of figurative works, this symbolizes death through semiological structure (not primarily iconographic), and thus, in a certain way, the fundamental meaning of this work lies in death.” (loc.cit, p.56)

Excerpt from a discussion between Ulrich Loock and Thomas Schütte on urns: Loock: You have brought with you the corporeality of the “other”? Schütte: The “others” are the same, with a head on. Loock: Conversely, one could say that the urns are an interpretation of the body: the body as an empty shell. That’s not a very metaphysical understanding of the human body. (...)
Schütte: For each new work there’s a motto, one which suddenly comes to you. It then solidifies and pretty quickly takes on a form. There are quite a lot of urns, but each with a different glaze, almost all blotted.
Loock: The glazes emphasise the surface, even the superficiality. They are bodies whose innards are missing, that enclose an empty space.
Schütte: No, that’s not a hole. There’s something inside.
Loock: But nothing like a skeleton or an organic substructure?
Schütte: No, there are lots of feelings inside for which one has no form. That’s why we make a container.
Loock: In a displaced manner, that is reflected in the glaze. The glaze is varied, attractive, present and visible.”...
(Ulrich Loock, Thomas Schütte, published by the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, from the Collector’s Choice series, artist monographs, Vol. 2, Cologne 2004, p.154f)