Thomas Schütte, Old Friends Revisited - Limited Edition, 2023 Edition of 300

Bilingual English & German

Old Friends Revisited - Limited Edition, 2023 edition of 300, with fifty additional Artist Proofs, each signed by the artist.

The prints are presented in a green clothbound, stamped clamshell box, accompanied by a copy of the book Thomas Schütte: Old Friends Revisited (Cahiers d'Art, 2023).

This Print accompanies the bilingual English & German Limited Edition
Old Friends Revisited, 2021
Inkjet pigment print on Tecco PM matt, 230g
Title and date lower center, printed on front
Signed and numbered lower right, pencil (front)
31.5 x 24.5 / 12 2/5 x 9 1/2 Inches

The book features Schütte’s Old Friends Revisited series, comprising 27 ceramic heads, each created in three unique casts with distinct colors and glazes. This masterful ensemble is presented in its entirety, along with an exploration of its genesis.

As art historian Éric de Chassey writes in the book:
"Each piece portrays old men whose deeply individualized features, marked by the decrepitude of flesh, are not intended to depict specific individuals. In 1994, Schütte described these ‘criminal faces’ as not realistic, but ones that ‘really exist.’ They evoke the characters of Beckett’s last play, What Where, who appear as floating faces, dissolving in and out of the TV screen, shrouded and mask-like. Dramatically lit, their faces bear prominent marks and wrinkles.

Though expressionless, Beckett’s four protagonists flatly utter repetitive sentences that suggest they have been both torturers and tortured—pathetic and tragic figures at once. Similarly, Schütte’s Old Friends Revisited blend cruelty, humor, frailty, grandiloquence, and decorativeness in a way that poignantly addresses our current situation."

Éric de Chassey is a distinguished French art historian and critic. He served as director of the French Academy in Rome (Villa Médicis) from 2009 to 2015 and has been the director of the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA) since 2016. A prolific writer on modern and contemporary art, he has curated numerous significant exhibitions in France and internationally.