Pieter Schoolwerth’s vivid multimedia paintings, collages and wooden reliefs create complex figurative scenes that analogize how technology, or other ‘forces of abstraction’, as he calls them, produce the world we live in. He is specifically interested in how these elements affect the interpersonal communication and atomised social relations of contemporary society. Schoolwerth investigates the split between material substance and the virtual space: he says of his work that it functions in the space between things, genders, species, and also between physical and conceptual space.

His elaborate production process combines sculpture, photography and painting and moves between digital and handmade modes. Photographs of live models and objects form the compositional base of his work. From these photographs, Schoolwerth creates hand-cut three-dimensional foam-core models, only for these assembled scenes to be photographed again and digitally manipulated and edited. This image is printed onto canvas and finally, painted over with oil pigments, adding details and texture. The end product – such as 'Privacy Settings #2' (2017) – is a dazzling, multidimensional scene, at once playful but also profoundly disorienting and illusory. The artist uses the term ‘reverse cubism’ to describe his work: a way of representing multiple objects from a single point in time, and again an analogy for the simultaneity and fast-paced movement of the digital age.