Pieter Schoolwerth (b. 1970, St. Louis, MO)

American artist Pieter Schoolwerth works in a multitude of mediums including painting sculpture, installation, and video. His paintings capture the invisible flows of abstraction that structure contemporary experience, turning them into motifs for an elaborate new kind of figurative painting. In his work, the stuff of paint itself reappears as a supplement only at the end of a complex, multi-media effort to produce a figurative picture depicting the ‘once removed’ space of the virtual.

Since graduating from the California Institute of the Arts in 1994, 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. His monograph Model as Painting was published by Sequence Press/MIT in 2019, and he presented his mid-career survey show “No Body Get a Head 1991-2020” at the Kunstverein Hannover in 2021, curated by Kathleen Rahn. From 2003–2013 Schoolwerth ran Wierd Records and the Wierd Party in the Lower East Side of NYC, releasing music by 46 bands and producing over 500 live music, DJ, and performance art events. 

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.