Thomas Schütte (born in Oldenburg in 1954) is a German sculptor and draughtsman who lives and works in Düsseldorf. His significance lies in the range of techniques and formats he has used, which makes it difficult to place his work within a single artistic current.
From 1973 to 1981 he studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where his teachers included Fritz Schwegler and Gerhard Richter. Over the following years he developed a practice that combines architectural models, such as Holiday Houses for Terrorists, with prints, watercolours and large-scale sculptures, often built from clay, wood and other composite materials.
In 2005 he received the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the Venice Biennale. In 2007 his work Model for a Hotel, made of coloured glass panes, was selected for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. Several of his pieces are held by major international museums: Vater Staat, in two versions, belongs to the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
The bronze sculpture Enemies United was shown in Central Park, New York, from March to August 2013. Another bronze, Great Spirit, has stood on the steps of the New Museum in Weimar since 1998. In 2016 he opened the Skulpturenhalle Neuss, a pavilion next to the former Hombroich missile base near Neuss, intended both for showing his own work and that of other artists and for storing his sculptures. In 2019 he designed a pavilion 15 metres in diameter in Krefeld, created to mark the centenary of the Bauhaus.
His legacy rests on the breadth of his output, which has linked sculpture, architecture and drawing while keeping a recognisable visual language.