carlier | gebauer, Madrid, is pleased to announce an exhibition of Thomas Schütte’s new heads. With five ceramics from the series Old Friends Revisited and a large Frauenkopf (Woman’s Head) as well as the portfolio Old Friends Revisited – 12 Scenes, consisting of inkjet pigment prints, the exhibition showcases a cycle of works that has held the sculptor’s creative attention for thirty years.

Schütte stages the grotesque presences of Old Friends Revisited, by endowing the classic portrait bust with ludicrous shaping of the facial features and gaudily coloured, reflecting glazes. The “old friends” first made their appearance in the form of figures with more or less fist-sized heads in the year 1992 when Schütte held a residential scholarship in the Villa Massimo in Rome and legal investigations were revealing hitherto inconceivable ties between the worlds of politics and organized crime. Continuously, the artist recalls, “these shifty, crooked faces” were present in the media. The boundless political and moral corruption seems to have served Schütte as a stimulus and justification for abandoning the marriage of the human face to natural forms, as firmly inscribed by art history, in favour of figurative excesses. It is not as if the Old Friends were bestowing a face on moral degeneracy and turpitude: quite the reverse, Schütte’s heads display the impossibility of giving visual form to wickedness and criminal wrong-doing. Elaborately modelled physiognomies proclaim their disjunction from the meanings they lead one to expect. What such severance from conventional ties makes possible – as if it were a new beginning – is a contagious delight in formal inventions. Together with the return to tried and tested models of sculptural embodiment from earlier years, the semiological break seems to enable Schütte to expand extraordinarily the aesthetic potential of his art. This transgression of limits finds expression especially in the experimental, unusually rich and gleaming surfaces of the sculptures, produced by the rule-contravening overlaying of two different glazes and the correspondingly unforeseeable material effects. The intrusion into the world of images of faces that are simultaneously repulsive and aesthetically lavish is given genealogical validation by an ancestral gallery of “old friends” – large-format, inkjet-printed photographs of small heads made of coloured modelling compound.