Thomas Schütte. Genealogies
Palazzo Grassi – Pinault Collection
April 06 – November 11, 2025

Pinault Collection presents the first major exhibition of Thomas Schütte (b. 1954, Oldenburg, Germany) in Italy, at the Punta della Dogana, curated by Camille Morineau, independent curator, and Jean-Marie Gallais, curator at the Pinault Collection.

Unclassifiable and multi-faceted, Thomas Schütte’s takes an unsettling and ironic look at the human condition, blending techniques and genres. His sculptures, architectural models, photographs, drawings and engravings have since the late 1970s formed a constantly evolving oeuvre that, in the artist’s own words, aims to “introduce a distorted question mark into the world”.

Though Thomas Schütte is considered to be one of the reinventors of contemporary sculpture, his exhibition at Punta della Dogana is the first to take place on this scale in Italy. Under the title Genealogies, the exhibition highlights the unifying threads that link together the different moments in his œuvre – the relationship he works out there between drawing and sculpture, his enduring fascination for the human figure, his work’s deep rootedness in history, in art history as well as his own. Thanks to his willingness and kindness, the exhibition is bringing together his sculptures, which I’ve been collecting for over twenty years now, with a huge collection of drawings that have never or rarely been shown in public before.

The exhibition explores the flow of motifs in the artist’s major works, from the 1970s to the present day. Centred around the exceptional group of works belonging to the Pinault Collection (almost fifty sculptures) and accompanied by loans from the artist, as well as around a hundred works on paper, many of which have never been displayed before, the exhibition retraces, in a non-chronological way, the emergence of the forms and their variations, and compares them with the German artist’s practice of drawing, watercolour and printmaking.

Caricatured, sometimes mishandled, always poignant, Schütte’s figures, the central subject of the works in the Pinault Collection, come to life in clay, wax, ceramics, glass, steel or bronze, as full-length portraits or as heads of character, while remaining anchored in his drawing. Reconciling violence and ingenuity, intimacy and theatricality, seriousness and humour, the artist’s singular universe has earned him a major role in contemporary art.

The exhibition is supported by Bottega Veneta.

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