American artist Pieter Schoolwerth has first show in Brussels

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The first Brussels solo exhibition by American artist, Pieter Schoolwerth is currently showing at Galerie Nathalie Obadia, following ‘Portraits of Paintings’ in Paris in 2010. Pieter Schoolwerth was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1970 and graduated from the California Institute of Art. He lives and works in New York, where he has been exhibiting regularly since 1994. The artist has been involved in many group shows, including ‘Pop Surrealism’ at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut in 1998; ‘Festival Polyphonix’ at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2002; ‘Drawing Out of the Void’ at Vestry Arts, Inc. in New York in 2004; ‘Tomorrow Land: CalArts’ in Moving Picture at MOMA, New York in 2006, and ‘Leave No Trace’ at ISCP in New York in 2009.

The current show is made up of recent works which, like the series ‘After Troy’ at Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York in November 2012, explore the fecundity of Pieter Schoolwerth’s latest pictorial researches. The works on show in Brussels are the fruits of two other projects: ‘The Z-axis Cycle’ and ‘Portraits of Paintings’, held respectively at Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York in 2009 and at Galerie Obadia in Paris in 2010.

Taking a huge repertoire of images, ranging from the Renaissance to the 19th century, from mythological painting to still life, Pieter Schoolwerth revisits the art of the old masters by reference to a completely personal and original synthesis. Somewhere between the abstract and the figurative, tracing and compression, his paintings modify and redeploy the shapes from the past which they draw on for their inspiration, in order, as he puts it, ‘to address the contemporary world’.

For details of showing times, see the Galerie Nathalie Obadia website. This exhibition closes on 14 July 2013

Gallerie Nathalie Obadia
8, rue Charles Decoster
B-1050 Bruxelles (Brussels)