Pieter Schoolwerth

Pieter Schoolwerth (b. 1970, St. Louis, Missouri) After graduating from the California Institute of the Arts in 1994, he moved to New York. From 2003 to 2013, Schoolwerth founded and ran Wierd Records , a now legendary institution based out of New York’s Lower East Side that released music by 46 bands and produced over 500 live shows and performance events. Schoolwerth’s wide-ranging and layered art practice is bound together by a spirit of restless experimentation that often explores how the human body is represented in a constantly mutating world. From minimal and expressionistic reinterpretations of Old Masters paintings to NFTs created from purchased and wildly retooled 3D figures and backdrops, Schoolwerth’s distinct bodies of work are united in their resolve to push the craft of art-making forward with investigations in form and technology. His paintings, sculpture, films, and collages are often created using multi-stepped techniques that weave together different materials and processes, both analogue and digital. Though forward thinking, Schoolwerth creates pieces that have an acute understanding of historic visual movements and has referenced Bruegel, Caravaggio, Hans Arp, and Louise Nevelson. In 2021, the Hannover Kunstverein opened the largest survey of Schoolwerth’s work to date organized by Kathleen Rahn: No Body Get a Head, 1991–2020 . Other notable exhibitions have taken place at Capitain Petzel, Berlin; Greene Naftali, New York; Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin; Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; Thread Waxing Space, New York; Twelve Ten Gallery, Chicago; and What Pipeline, Detroit. In 2018, Schoolwerth participated in the inaugural FRONT International in Cleveland. His work has also been featured in exhibitions at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Whitney Museum, New York; among others. His work is in the permanent collections of the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Denver Art Museum; Hall Art Foundation, Reading, Vermont & Derneburg, Germany; Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig; Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Phoenix Art Museum; Pinault Collection, Paris; Sammlung Boros, Berlin; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and more. Pieter Schoolwerth lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. “I’ve always been interested in the ways in which the ever-changing, and often invisible, forces of abstraction in the world affect the task of representing the human body. I’ve come to use the photographed shadow to represent the performance of your digital body when we’re not together.”