Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic \u201cWhat I do involves a lot of dirt,\u201d says Thomas Sch\u00fctte as he lights another cigarette. \u201cDirt and dust and material. Other people might make video art, but I can\u2019t sit down and work like that. I like to handle material. Working with clay is like therapy. And if I get bored with that, I turn to something else.\u201dThe German artist, who turned 70 last year, is perched above Venice, in the twisting tower of the Punta della Dogana. One of the two historical buildings in the city converted into art galleries in the 2000s by luxury magnate Fran\u00e7ois Pinault, the Dogana is a former customs house, and occupies the triangular tip of land where the Grand Canal and the Giudecca Canal converge. The view from up here is sensational on a sunny spring day but Sch\u00fctte likes this spot because it\u2019s outdoors and he can smoke. He keeps a tiny round tin in the pocket of his buff linen jacket for the cigarette butts.Below, in the Dogana\u2019s capacious rooms, is a new exhibition of his work from 1977 to now, though it is no retrospective. Instead it follows certain lines of connection and repeated motifs through his five-decade career \u2014 it is called Genealogies \u2014 and includes the monumentally scaled sculptures that Sch\u00fctte-watchers might expect as well as a number of intimate watercolours that have never been shown before. It\u2019s a tonal yin and yang \u2014 from very loud to quiet as a whisper.Sch\u00fctte is best known for the first \u2014 contorted fighters with froggy faces; busts of big-nosed, sunken-cheeked dignitaries on heroic plinths; elongated, collapsing Michelin men in aluminium (three are permanently installed outside Chicago\u2019s Museum of Contemporary Art). Lumpy, large and sometimes lunging, Sch\u00fctte\u2019s men are out-sized, messed-up versions of their classical statuary antecedents; critiques of assumed but delusional superiority. Their faces are imaginary, but somehow still recognisable \u2014 the sort that fill our news feeds, doers of both right and wrong.The watercolours, though, are altogether different: brilliantly coloured and virtuosic sketches of snakes and flowers; faces, ladders, letters, even \u2014 the epitome of despair \u2014 a single lost sock. This is Sch\u00fctte\u2019s diary: swiftly made, deeply personal. \u201cI\u2019m not a man of words,\u201d he says. His tales of the fragile human condition are visually told.Sch\u00fctte is one of those artists who is both \u201cinternational\u201d and not exactly a household name. He won a Golden Lion \u2014 one of the art world\u2019s top accolades \u2014 at the Venice Art Biennale in 2005. MoMA staged a big retrospective in New York last autumn. Positively reviewed, it didn\u2019t make the must-see lists. It is perhaps because his work is slippery to understand as it totters from elliptical to bombastic. Sch\u00fctte certainly doesn\u2019t push a brand. His range is huge \u2014 bronzes, works in glass, mangled female nudes, laugh-out-loud sculptures (a Pringle balanced on a matchbox!), and architectural models. There\u2019s even a series of gravures of plants on show in Venice. They are called \u201cFleurs pour M Duchamp\u201d, because nature is full of the \u201cready-mades\u201d with which Duchamp single-handedly changed the story of western art and Sch\u00fctte is paying his respects.But, as this exhibition aims to show, he does cleave to a number of themes: our delusional selves, anxiety, the corruption of the powerful, the impossibility of defining good and bad, the inevitability of death. \u201cThe work is about all parts of human identity, but not in a blatant way,\u201d says Camille Morineau, co-curator of the Venice exhibition. \u201cIt\u2019s open and complex. What some people see as a comical take on human failure, others see as terribly sad.\u201dSch\u00fctte studied at the Kunstakademie in D\u00fcsseldorf through most of the 1970s, where peers included the sculptor Katharina Fritsch and the photographer Thomas Struth. \u201cPeople talk about the \u201970s in Germany as the grey decade,\u201d he says. \u201cBut they were pretty wild. All the films, the music . . .\u201d One teacher was Gerhard Richter \u2014 the artist famed for blurry realist paintings and multi-million-dollar auction results \u2014 who impressed upon his students that they should find their own way and build a wide repertoire of work.Sch\u00fctte did both and, like Richter, he embraces and challenges centuries of art history in his work. Look at his women, lying on their cold bronze slabs, taking their cues from Michelangelo to Maillol, the paintings of Ingres, and the smashed-up nudes of cubism. They are both reflections on centuries of objectification, and intense studies in form. \u201cMost of the time, I have the feeling that it\u2019s not me who has made them,\u201d he says. \u201cThis is a story I did not write.\u201dOn the terrace of the tower, Sch\u00fctte talks about his day. \u201cI have mornings now,\u201d he says. \u201cI used to sleep until 11 or 12, but then I stopped drinking. It had become dangerous.\u201d This was in 2022. He checked into a psychiatric clinic near D\u00fcsseldorf, and during his recovery made many of the watercolours on show here. \u201cI walk the three minutes from my house to my studio, then . . . we go to the ceramic workshop in Cologne or the bronze foundry in D\u00fcsseldorf.\u201d He owns neither, preferring to co-opt other people\u2019s spaces.In 1989, Sch\u00fctte created a series of flags, taking the most political of objects \u2014 and one with a direct relationship to abstract expressionism and its implications of American cultural imperialism \u2014 and turning it into pictorial canvas. Not seen since, these flags, \u201cDEKA Fahnen\u201d, hang in the first room of the exhibition, filling the walls with cherries, anchors, musical notes and piles of black lemons. On one, a potato is wearing a crown.They surround three huge bronze statues of men whipped by wind, their feet seemingly sunken into mud (\u201cMann im Wind I-III\u201d, 2018). It\u2019s a visual metaphor that Sch\u00fctte has used since the early 1980s, when the only way he could make a wax figure stand up was to submerge it in ever more wax. \u201cBut often I feel like this,\u201d he says, \u201creally stuck, nowhere to go.\u201dIt\u2019s a slightly disingenuous stance for such a prolific artist, whose scale of work has grown with his reputation. This has perhaps reached its conclusion with \u201cVater Staat\u201d\u00a0(\u201cFather State\u201d) \u2014\u00a0an almost 4m-high bronze that stands in the Dogana\u2019s original entrance, an impotent colossus wrapped in a dressing gown. \u201cHe is like a big puppet, a man with no substance,\u201d says Jean-Marie Gallais, who co-curated the exhibition with Morineau. The gown is familiar, from Rodin\u2019s famous likeness of Balzac, where it conferred some kind of genius. \u201cVater Staat\u201d\u2019s female counterpart, \u201cMutter Erde\u201d (\u201cMother Earth\u201d), stands at the Dogana\u2019s new entrance, strong and grounded and wearing a crown \u2014 a riposte to those who see his nudes as ugly or even misogynistic.The quiet watercolours near the end of the exhibition represent a total reversal of scale. \u201cI went to visit him at home, and he gave me a pile of all the drawings he made in the clinic in 2022, and 30 minutes to choose 50 of them,\u201d says Morineau. (Sch\u00fctte explains that he was cooking a risotto, and that\u2019s how long it takes.) \u201cWhen we finally hung them in the Dogana, it was difficult for him to see them on display. He couldn\u2019t walk through the room, he was just looking at the floor\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009He\u2019s very critical of himself and that\u2019s what makes him a good person and a good artist.\u201d Or as Sch\u00fctte himself says, \u201cIt\u2019s OK to have tears. It\u2019s those with no emotions who are really in trouble.\u201dTo November 23, pinaultcollection.com\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic \u201cWhat I do involves a lot of dirt,\u201d says Thomas Sch\u00fctte as he lights another cigarette. \u201cDirt and dust and material. Other people might make video art, but I can\u2019t sit down and work like that. I like to handle material. Working with clay<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":276493,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-276492","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276492"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276492\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":276494,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276492\/revisions\/276494"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}