“Art can change the view. It can change the mind. Potentially it is enlightenment, not entertainment.” - Thomas Schütte

With his dynamic and virtuosic handling of a multifarious range of media, German artist Thomas Schütte has established himself as one of the most prominent sculptors of his generation. As student of celebrated painter Gerhard Richter at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademiee, Schütte learned to experiment with painting and has since then exhibited a wide range of works in different media at various select institutions, such as the New Museum, the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the National Gallery in London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Sechs Geister, executed in 1995, demonstrates the creative materiality that characterises much of the artist’s oeuvre and is paradigmatic of the sculptures that form his definitive series of Geister works. Ghostly, fluid, and strikingly evocative, they are at once humorous and sinister, serving as an impenetrable reflection on the human condition.

Comprised of a group of six, the small figures are positioned in a sequence of movements that, though distinctly human, simultaneously allude to a whimsical and mechanised quality. In fact, it is this toy like aspect of the figures that make them enticing and playful yet slightly menacing. Sechs Geister taps directly into “the uncanny,” a psychological concept theorized by eminent psychologist Sigmund Freud at the turn of the twentieth century. Derived from the German term for “home,” the uncanny is anything that is at once familiar but simultaneously strange or threatening. In fact, it is precisely this familiarity that makes uncanny things so unnerving. Freud explicates that we fear figures of the uncanny because these, by virtue of resembling us, ultimately have the power to replace us, that is, to become our usurpers. This is why Freud lists dolls, ghosts, and the doppelganger as paragons of the uncanny. By extension, the uncanny is anything that blurs the distinction between the original and the copy, the live being and the inanimate object. Schütte’s art clearly seeks to straddle the line between the animate and inanimate and thus develops an uncanny aura. Through its multiplications of figures and even its title, Sechs Geister further channels the power of the uncanny and, in this fashion, aligns itself, conceptually if not formally, with a long history of avant-garde art. Surrealism, the art movement of the uncanny par excellence, produced a string of artworks that mobilized the uncanny. Recall, for example, surrealist artist Hans Bellmer’s eerie photographic images of doubled doll limbs or Frida Kahlo’s famous self-portraits of two versions of herself. Schütte’s concern with the profoundly human reveals itself in this work’s ability to activate the psychological side of its viewers.

Overall, the sextet represents a synthesis of the otherworldly, the fantastical, and the altogether ambiguous, possessing an irrefutable wit, captivating mysteriousness, and aesthetic charm that stem from Schütte’s masterful manipulation of scale and material. Their physicality and sense of movement also directly communicate the artist’s long-standing concern with humanity and the manner in which it can be represented through art. The carefully composed, almost balletic, gestures of the Sechs Geister reveal his significant preoccupation with figuration, and in particular, the body’s ability to express itself through movement and pose. As with all of the artist’s work, Sechs Geister reflects Schütte’s formal ingenuity and artistic independence, his joy of materiality and his passion of working with his hands in an age of all things digital. Schütte’s unwavering adherence to the honesty and authenticity of both manual labour and palpable mediums has its historical antecedents in Renaissance masters, such as Michelangelo, whose conception of the artist was precisely based in this bodily encounter with raw materials. Describing the love of craftsmanship that drives his practice, Schütte states: “You’ve got to just make it, with your hands and body. Your body will tell you when it’s good. Just three seconds of little video images, a darkened room, and the smell of musty carpet and I have to get out… I just get up and go because the virtual does not interest me at all. A scratch in a copperplate, a fingerprint in clay, or burnt polystyrene: that’s what I like. Precisely the kind of things that were forbidden in our college days: the artist’s mark, finger, body, something individual”, (Thomas Schütte in U. Loock, Frieze, d/e no. 8, February/March 2013).

Indeed, solid in medium, yet seemingly fluid in their shape-shifting intensity, the figures convey the impossibility of human communication, and the complexities and contradictions of human behaviour. The very way in which they were constructed is paramount to this: created from long strands of wax that Schütte twisted together in the form of spirals, the figures were immersed in a liquid wax before being cast in bronze and painted black. The malleable wire allows for a true variety of posture, while the wax—a material known for its ability to mimic skin—enables the bronze to approach the supple, life-like quality of flesh. With the sense of mutability and elusiveness infused into their physical state, Sechs Geister is exemplary of the theme of experimentation that pervades the artist’s body of work. It evokes, in the firm and enduring form of sculpture, impermanence and the continuous motion of the body.