(b. 1970, USA), Lives and works in New York
In his multimedia practice Pieter Schoolwerth explores the effects of generalised abstraction on representation of human form in painting. In his complex process he employs tools from mediums like sculpture, photography and installation, moving between digital and handmade modes of creating. The artist first photographs his live models and objects to form a compositional base of his work and then creates hand-cut three-dimensional models, to only then assemble the scenes to be photographed and digitally manipulated. Following that, Schoolwerth prints the images onto canvas and paints over it with oil pigments, adding details and texture. This process of ‘reverse cubism’ as the artist calls it, produces complex and dazzling paintings of multidimensional space inhibited by figurative pictures that are at once removed from reality, as an analogy for the fast-paced movement of the digital age.
Pieter Schoolwerth has exhibited nationally and internationally with notable solo shows at Thread Waxing Space (New York); Greene Naftali (New York); Grand Palais (Paris); Miguel Abreu Gallery (New York); What Pipeline (Detroit); Capitain Petzel (Berlin); Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler (Berlin) and Petzel (New York). His work has been included in group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art (New York); The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); Centre Pompidou, (Paris); The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield); The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston); Sadie Coles (London) among others. Schoolwerth’s work is in the permanent collections of the Pinault Collection (Venice and Paris); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, (San Francisco); Kistefos Museum and Sculpture Park (Jevnaker); Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles); The Aïshti Foundation (Beirut); Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst (Leipzig); Denver Art Museum (Denver); and the Stavanger Art Museum (Stavanger), among others.