“What interests me is the tension between the material and the meaning—the way form is something you can read, not just see.”
Richard Deacon and Thomas Schütte, prominent figures in contemporary sculpture, began their collaboration in the early 1990s, culminating in the 1995 installation Them and Us. This installation, exhibited at London's Lisson Gallery, featured Schütte's enigmatic "Kleine Geister" (Small Ghosts) figures interacting with Deacon's geometric and organic felt constructions. The installation explored themes of duality and dialogue, with each artist maintaining their distinct style while engaging in a shared narrative. Their collaboration reflected a broader exchange among sculptors during that period, blending Deacon's pragmatic experimentation with Schütte's innovative figuration, exploring the boundaries between the personal and the political, the material and the metaphorical.
Executed in 1995, the work is part of the limited and critically lauded series in which the artists combined their distinct sculptural languages into a joint meditation on identity, division, and the constructed nature of the human condition. The piece presents a striking juxtaposition: a small, resolute aluminium figure, cast in Schütte’s characteristically expressive idiom, is encircled by a heavy coil of felt and hair—a signature material in Deacon’s vocabulary of organic, tactile form. The figure’s defiant stance suggests a posture of resistance or entrapment, while the soft, animalistic bulk of the coiled material evokes both protection and constraint. In this dialectic, the sculpture stages a confrontation—"them" and "us"—that is at once socio-political and existential.

“I am interested in the human figure, not in a heroic or classical way, but as a bearer of emotions, of doubt, of vulnerability.”
Schütte's contribution is a continuation of his ongoing investigation into the fragility and absurdity of the human form, often rendered in miniature yet imbued with monumentality. The aluminium figure, reflective and hermetically self-contained, becomes a kind of everyman—vulnerable, isolated, and perhaps, by implication, embattled. Deacon, meanwhile, deploys his material sensibility to create a sensorial enclosure. The felt—historically charged by Joseph Beuys with connotations of warmth, healing, and insulation—here appears more ambiguous, even ominous, as it spirals around the figure like a constricting force.
Together, the artists create a resonant sculptural dialogue, charged with tension yet exquisitely resolved in its formal balance. The collaboration neither dilutes nor merges their practices but instead enacts a sophisticated interplay between them—each artist retaining autonomy while amplifying the conceptual depth of the other. The present work is emblematic of the mid-1990s period in which both Deacon and Schutte were grappling with questions of collective identity and sculptural agency in a rapidly globalising art world. It stands as a testament not only to their individual brilliance but to the possibility of collaborative practice as a mode of critical engagement.