Thomas SchUtte Old Friends Revisited /anglais/allemand

Cahiers d’Art presents a new collaboration with German artist Thomas Schütte. The book features his series Old Friends Revisited, composed of 27 ceramic heads, each created in three unique casts, with different colors and glazes. The series is presented in its entirety and recounts the genesis of this masterly ensemble. As the art historian Éric de Chassey writes in the book: “They each portray old men, whose features, although deeply individualized in the decrepitude of the flesh, are not meant to depict specific human beings. They belong to the long history of generic portraiture of old age, which depending on the context in which they appear, can be associated with the names of philosophers whose faces we ignore (such as the Greek philosophers in ancient Roman sculpted portraiture; Spanish, Dutch, and Italian seventeenth-century paintings; or the ancient literati of Chinese scroll paintings), with figures of rulers whose reigns did not leave sufficient traces to make them recognizable by name or with anonymous members of all classes who are the bread and butter of caricatures aiming at criticizing the state of society.”