Artist Pieter Schoolwerth has produced a new fundraising edition on the occasion of Printed Matter’s participation in EXPO Chicago. Central in this work is a figure in the process of being warped, filtered, or manipulated. The body is a complex multimedia composite, much like Schoolwerth’s production process, which includes painting, sculpture, printmaking, and computer generated imagery. Complete your Face is part of a larger body of work, the artist’s Rigged series, as in “everything is rigged”—a common and defeated turn of phrase that has come to define general sentiments across the political spectrum. The Rigged series also reflects on the ways we fabricate our lived experiences for online consumption. Each print includes hand-painted flourishes, reinforcing the theme and effect of three-dimensional layering.
Pieter Schoolwerth lives and works in New York. Schoolwerth’s paintings capture the 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. Schoolwerth has exhibited internationally since 1994, 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. 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.
Archival pigment print on Hahnemule paper hand-detailed in acrylic, mounted on 1/8" white sintra
