Thomas Schütte Early Works At Henry Moore Institute

The picture shows 'Lager (Store) 1978 Wooden board, paint, varnish'.

Gathering acclaim even before he graduated, Schütte's Academy work launched a glorious career encompassing numerous exhibitions worldwide, a commission for Trafalgar Square's famous Fourth Plinth and the Golden Lion award at the 2005 Venice Biennale.

Schütte's early works were often installed in the Düsseldorf apartments of his friends and tutors, including Richter and fellow student Thomas Struth, later known for his attempts to capture the psychological dynamics between his photographic subjects.

The late 1970s projects collected by the Henry Moore Institute – comprising different wall-based works – often looked to find space between 'fake' decorative art and 'functional' architecture.

Playing with the conditions of their site and commission, the Fake/Function installations borrow freely from traditional stage design and modern conceptual art, using wallpapers, bricks, tiles and rings across the wall's surfaces.

These facades used classic decorative techniques like pairing, grouping and arranging shapes to ask where the boundaries lay between aesthetics and illusion – works such as Great Wall (1977) used overpainted panels to resemble a brick wall, not replacing but combining architecture with art.

The slow changes in patterns of simplistic shapes characterise these works, revealed in 1980 to be a single project at an exhibition in Rudiger Schöttle's Munich gallery – a project that the Institute allows to be seen in its visionary entirety.

Richter's influence can be seen in the subtle variations within Schütte's groupings, which drew upon modern sculpture in their attempt to find new directions for Minimalist art, and subvert the tired architectural obsession with form following function.

Schütte moved into sculpture after graduating in 1981, creating a series of models entitled Man in Mud from 1982 to 1985. In 1987 he gave up painting for health reasons, taking part in Münster's Skulptur Projekte, as he did both in 1997 and this year. Schütte worked predominately in sculpture until the birth of his daughter Carla in 1994, which encouraged him to experiment with real-life drawing.

Still living in Düsseldorf, Schütte continues to combine sculpture, modelling and architecture, winning the Fourth Plinth commission in March 2004. Model for a Hotel 2007 will be unveiled on Wednesday 7 November, and will remain on the plinth, designed by Sir Charles Barry in 1841, for eighteen months.

It is an architectural model composed of three blocks: a 21-storey building, a lobby, and a horizontal block of eight storeys, extending over the edge of the plinth.

Schütte still exhibits indoors, too, opening recent solo shows at the Frith Street Gallery, London, and the Galerie Nelson-Freeman in Paris. The exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute shows how Schütte began asking, and solving, questions of how to fuse architecture and design in specific sites and offers insight into Schütte's trajectory as one of Europe's most important conceptual artists. www.24hourmuseum.org.uk