Pieter Schoolwerth: Displacement Map
This exhibition of eleven paintings and animated videos is the latest iteration of Schoolwerth’s Rigged project, which begins from conflating the rigged skeleton of a 3D model with technological infrastructure. Skinlike layers of the lifeforms in his paintings are depicted as warped, shifted, and peeling off the physical body, dramatizing the contemporary split of public and private life in an age of performative identity construction. Schoolwerth utilizes a complex multimedia process to compose paintings in CGI animation software using digital assets purchased online.
The show’s title refers to displacement mapping, an effect deployed in 3D software to construct geometry which distorts the grid of mesh wrapping the exterior surface layer of his depicted figures - causing visual deformations and abstractions of the body.
The reel of delirious looping animations in the exhibition is by PuppetWarp – a collaboration between Schoolwerth, artist Phil Vanderhyden, and musician Aaron Dilloway – which presents soundtracked moving images of the CGI files Schoolwerth utilizes to create the paintings in the show.
Pieter Schoolwerth, born in 1970, received his BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1994. He lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions at Petzel Gallery, New York (2024, solo) (upcoming); Duarte Sequeira, Seoul (2023, solo) (upcoming); Stavanger Art Museum, Norway (2023); Petzel Gallery, New York (2022); Petzel Gallery, New York (2022, solo); Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin (2022, solo); Kunstverein Hannover (2021, solo); Petzel Gallery, New York (2020, solo); Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin (2019, solo); the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson (2018); Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (2017, solo); Capitain Petzel, Berlin (2017, solo); theWhitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); 356 Mission, Los Angeles (2015, solo); Gallery SKE,New Delhi (2014, solo); Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Brussels (2013, solo); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York (2005, solo); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2002); American Fine Arts, New York (2001, solo) and Greene Naftali Gallery, New York (1996, solo).
