Ceramic Sketch

These two charming ceramics are maquettes for Thomas Schütte’s Frauen (Women), an important series of large-scale steel, bronze and aluminium works in which the artist deconstructs – and subverts – the language of monumental sculpture. The small ceramics are a key part of his process, allowing an expressive, three-dimensional immediacy of creation. As Schütte tells it, the finished Frauen ‘are not drawn from nude models – it may come to that in the future – and neither are they modelled or sketched. They are all made from ceramic effusions’ (T. Schütte, quoted in U. Loock, Thomas Schütte, Cologne 2004, p. 173). Integral to Schütte’s exploration of sculptural tradition is the plinth, which typically confers a certain power and gravity upon the figure that it supports. Each of his maquette women is fashioned from a single piece of clay together with her base, conceiving the two as indivisible. The present two works display Schütte’s playfully disruptive approach to this convention, as well as a delightful use of colour. With his deft command of form, texture, and finish, Schütte uses the ceramics as a way to switch tactics and surprise expectations, making platform into container or stage, and figure into bather or performer. In one, he transforms the plinth into a bright yellow bathtub: a blue glaze trickles like overflowing water down its sides, and a smiling burgundy woman splashes exuberantly within. In the other, a geisha-like figure dripping in yellow and black kneels upon a raw-edged base, the top of which is glazed and spattered in the same lacquer-like colours that pour from her hair – it is as if she has emerged from the earth, foregrounding the material congruence between figure and plinth. The plinth also conjures a different association here, recalling the raised tatami flooring in a traditional Japanese home.