Thomas Schütte – Old Friends Revisited

Old Friends Revisited (2021) is a high-pigment inkjet print in colour on Tecco paper, published by Texte zur Kunst, Berlin, in an edition of 35 plus 10 artist's proofs. Each sheet is signed, dated and numbered in pencil, printed in Germany and presented with full margins.

The image shows a bald, ageing man's head tilted back, his mouth open. One half of the face is a cool grey. The other half is covered in a glossy blue surface flecked with small white dots, with the features pushed into deep folds around the eyes and brow.

The print belongs to the group of works Thomas Schütte made in 2021 in his Düsseldorf studio under the title Old Friends Revisited. Cahiers d'Art, which showed the group in Paris, describes it as ceramic heads and a portfolio of inkjet portraits. These develop the earlier Old Friends, small figures with heads modelled in coloured FIMO, which Schütte has photographed and enlarged since the 1990s. The faces recall Franz Xaver Messerschmidt's character heads and Honoré Daumier's caricatures. In this photographic work, anger, grief and mistrust are carried by the expression alone.

Thomas Schütte (b. 1954, Oldenburg) is a German sculptor and printmaker who lives and works in Düsseldorf. He studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where his teachers included Gerhard Richter, and graduated in 1981. He is regarded as one of the most influential sculptors of his generation.

Schütte works in bronze, steel, aluminium, glass, ceramic and clay, and also in watercolour, etching and photography. He often moves between scales, making miniature models and later enlarging them into monumental works. His recurring subjects are the human figure and face, architecture, and models for public space. He has said that he is interested in subjects the art world tends to neglect, such as flowers, faces, portraits and houses.

The series United Enemies, begun in Rome in 1992, shows small figures with heads modelled in coloured FIMO clay. Their grotesque, caricatured faces have since been photographed and enlarged, and the series continues in Old Friends and Old Friends Revisited. Other well-known works include the bronze figure group Große Geister (Large Spirits) and the architectural models of his Hotel and Mausoleum projects.

Schütte took part in Documenta in 1987, 1992 and 1997, and Documenta IX (1992) is regarded as his breakthrough. In 2005 he received the Golden Lion for best artist at the Venice Biennale. The Fondation Beyeler in Basel devoted a major solo exhibition to him in 2013. His work is in the collections of Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.