Pieter Schoolwerth is a painter, filmmaker, and musician who lives and works in New York. Schoolwerth’s ‘painting in the last instance’ captures invisible flows of abstraction that structure contemporary experience, and turns 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 receiving his BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1994, Pieter Schoolwerth has exhibited internationally, with notable solo shows at Thread Waxing Space, Greene Naftali, American Fine Arts Co., and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, Galerie SKE, New Delhi, India, Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels, and Capitain Petzel, Berlin. His work has been included in group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Hessel Museum of Art, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Sadie Coles HQ, London, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin, and Gavin Brown Enterprises, New York. His work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Denver Art Museum, and the Phoenix Art Museum. He has held teaching positions at Cooper Union, Bard College, and the Critical Theory and the Arts MA Program at The School of Visual Arts in New York.

Schoolwerth’s first monograph, Model as Painting, was published by Sequence Press in 2019, and his mid-career survey show will open at the Kunstverein Hannover in November 2020. From 2003–2013 Schoolwerth ran Wierd Records and the Wierd Party on the LES of NYC, releasing music by 46 bands and producing over 500 live music, DJ, and performance art events.