Thomas Schütte (born November 16, 1954, Oldenburg, Germany) is a German contemporary artist. From 1973 to 1981 he studied art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf alongside Katharina Fritsch under Gerhard Richter and Fritz Schwegler. He lives and works in Düsseldorf.

In the early 1980s Schütte began a series of small sculptural works depicting men stuck in mud. Today, Schütte's multidisciplinary work ranges widely, from early architectural installations to small-scale modeled figures and proposals for monuments, from extensive series of watercolors, to banners, flags, and photographs.

From life-sized figures fabricated in ceramic as in Die Fremden (The Strangers) (1992) to miniaturized monuments cast in bronze as in Gross...