Them and Us (X)

"Since the beginning of the 1980's, Thomas Schtte has developed an extensive and complex body of work, moving nimbly across scale, material, and subject: between the public and the private realms, indoor and outdoor space, abstraction and figuration, architectonic and the pictorial, humour and gloom, beauty and abject ugliness. (...) In 1995 and 1996, many aspects of this evident fascination with the figure appear to have come together into a group, which is still growing, of misshappen aluminium statues. These first appeared small, as shown in 'Them and Us', a collaboration with Richard Deacon at the Lisson Gallery in 1995 where they carried round strange hairy pod-like forms made by the British sculptor. (...) Their advantage as free-standing upright sculptural figures - remarkably devoid of a determined context, by Schtte's standards - is their freedom of association. They seem to evoke monsters of mythology and of contemporary popular culture, from Gozilla to the infinitely more sophisticated molten killer robot T-100 in the film 'Terminator 2'. Another less popular but no less terrying film, 'Tetsuo: Iron Man' by Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto, conjures up with great energy and visceral power a world where flesh and metal become one. At the same time, there are in Schtte's lumbering protagonists qualities that refer to a much older tradition, that of the golem, or organic robot, created by the Jewish alchemists to do their bidding, but possesing a tendency to run amok. (...) Schtte demostrates dramatically, and in a strange way tenderly, that our contemporary condition lies somewhere between the organic and the cybernetic, the self-determined and the pre-programmed, the generated and the invented." (G. Hilty, 'The Good and the Bad Ugly', in: 'Young German Artists 2. From the Saatchi Collection', London 1997, unpaged.)