EYES ON: Pieter Schoolwerth

The artist's 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, the artist 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 is a dazzling, multidimensional scene, at once playful but also profoundly disorienting and illusory. Schoolwerth 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.

In 2021 the Kunstverein Hannover dedicated a solo survey exhibition to Schoolwerth. Additionally, he has shown at many other institutions, among others at FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art, both in New York, Armory Art Center, West Palm Beach and Centre Pompidou, Paris. His work can also be found in the public collections of the Denver Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Orange County Museum of Art, and the Phoenix Art Museum.