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Lot Essay
Executed in 1991, and acquired by Roger and Josette Vanthournout the following year, Thomas Schütte’s Beeren (Berries) gleams with seductive charm. Sprawling more than a metre in width, this beguiling floor-based sculpture comprises seven glossy red orbs, rendered in aniline on wood and suspended from copper stalks. The work forms part of a small suite of berry sculptures unveiled at Tucci Russo, Turin in 1992: the same year that Schütte mounted his celebrated installation Die Fremden (Strangers) at documenta IX in Kassel. Taking its place within the artist’s wider body of fruit-based works, it is closely related to his 1987 Kirschensäule (Cherry Column): a public commission installed in the Harsewinkelplatz in Münster. Alive with art-historical references—from still-life and vanitas traditions to the sensuous icons of Pop Art—it demonstrates the vivid theatrical wit that lies at the heart of Schütte’s practice.
The Münster commission marked an important moment in Schütte’s early career. It was part of the second instalment of the Skulptur Projekte’s ten-yearly cycle, which invited works from a variety of established artists including Donald Judd, Daniel Buren and Claes Oldenburg. Schütte’s two gleaming cherries, perched atop a column made of local sandstone, poked fun at the concept of public sculpture as a means of enhancing squares and parks. As Clara Knapp writes, they offered a kind of comic ‘garnish’ to the city, occupying the spot where a real tree had once stood (C. Knapp, quoted at Skulptur Projekte Archiv, online). Set against the quotidian urban environment, the cherries offered a surreal incursion into everyday life, standing in luminous contrast to the bike racks, parking metres and phone booths that adorned the streets. Beeren, similarly, stops the viewer in their tracks, its form at once familiar and alien.
Schütte’s fruit sculptures stand in playful, humorous contrast to the distorted human figures that populate his practice. Alongside his cherries and berries, the artist also produced the large-scale installation Melonely (1986), comprising a set of dispersed wooden watermelon segments. Drawing upon his interests in staging and dramaturgy, works such as the present confront the viewer like props in a play, posing as outsized pieces of scenery. Beyond its smooth, Pop-like veneers, however—inviting comparison with the works of Oldenburg, Lichtenstein and Koons—Beeren also operates on a more subversive level. Just as his Frauen (Women), Geister (Spirits) and United Enemies sought to undermine the grandiloquent traditions of figurative sculpture, the work riffs upon the age-old genre of still-life, in which luscious fruits frequently functioned as reminders of life’s fleeting flame. Here, Schütte’s glistening berries offer a kind of modern-day memento mori, their tactile forms infused with uncanny anthropomorphic charge.
The Münster commission marked an important moment in Schütte’s early career. It was part of the second instalment of the Skulptur Projekte’s ten-yearly cycle, which invited works from a variety of established artists including Donald Judd, Daniel Buren and Claes Oldenburg. Schütte’s two gleaming cherries, perched atop a column made of local sandstone, poked fun at the concept of public sculpture as a means of enhancing squares and parks. As Clara Knapp writes, they offered a kind of comic ‘garnish’ to the city, occupying the spot where a real tree had once stood (C. Knapp, quoted at Skulptur Projekte Archiv, online). Set against the quotidian urban environment, the cherries offered a surreal incursion into everyday life, standing in luminous contrast to the bike racks, parking metres and phone booths that adorned the streets. Beeren, similarly, stops the viewer in their tracks, its form at once familiar and alien.
Schütte’s fruit sculptures stand in playful, humorous contrast to the distorted human figures that populate his practice. Alongside his cherries and berries, the artist also produced the large-scale installation Melonely (1986), comprising a set of dispersed wooden watermelon segments. Drawing upon his interests in staging and dramaturgy, works such as the present confront the viewer like props in a play, posing as outsized pieces of scenery. Beyond its smooth, Pop-like veneers, however—inviting comparison with the works of Oldenburg, Lichtenstein and Koons—Beeren also operates on a more subversive level. Just as his Frauen (Women), Geister (Spirits) and United Enemies sought to undermine the grandiloquent traditions of figurative sculpture, the work riffs upon the age-old genre of still-life, in which luscious fruits frequently functioned as reminders of life’s fleeting flame. Here, Schütte’s glistening berries offer a kind of modern-day memento mori, their tactile forms infused with uncanny anthropomorphic charge.