Peter Schuyff Exhibition
Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery
This event has ended.
Nicole Klagsbrun presents watercolors from the 1980’s and 1990’s by Peter Schuyff, and a painting. The works are on view from January 9 through February 20 at 526 W 26th Street Room 318, where Klagsbrun has maintained an office and showroom.
At first glance, the selection of intimately scaled watercolors dramatically contrasts with the large-format painting, yet with sustained attention numerous resonances emerge. Taken together, these works reveal an artist painting “for the eye and from the hand,” working against simplistic binaries, and exploring the possibilities of paint as a medium.
A hallmark of Schuyff’s remarkable output since the 1980s has been the interplay of surface pattern and optically convincing geometry, achieved through what Richard Hell has called “masses of color and shades of form.” Drawing fluidly upon modernist and postmodernist approaches to abstraction, Schuyff uses the language of paint to marry seemingly irreconcilable elements: biomorphic shape and algorithmic repetition, allover flatness and tightly rendered drop shadows.
The jewel-like watercolors presented here, never-before seen, offer a lesser-known perspective on Schuyff’s approach, using the organic dispersion of pigment rather than tightly focused handling of color, light and shadow. Often made while traveling, the artist allowed temperature and environmental factors to inflect the flow of paint. Produced with a much less controlled process than his customary work in oil and acrylic, these works afford the artist an uncharacteristic degree of abandon. With playful looseness and economy, Schuyff teases out numerous effects – modeling, light and shadow, reverberating color, interaction of foreground and background. At the same time, the chance contours made as paint seeps and spills are held in an exquisite tension with geometry and pattern. This delicate contrast is echoed in the large canvas, where spills and stains form the backdrop for a tightly rendered, mandala-like lozenge form. Both the watercolors and the painting are exceptional examples within Schuyff’s oeuvre and shed light on his ongoing experimentation.
Peter Schuyff’s paintings have been exhibited internationally since the 80’s. He first exhibited with Nicole Klagsbrun in 2007. He is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Broad, Los Angeles; Portland Art Museum, Portland; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Deste Foundation, Athens, Greece; among others. Recent New York exhibitions include the 2014 Whitney Museum Biennial and a solo exhibition featuring new paintings at Mary Boone Gallery in 2015. He has a forthcoming traveling 2016 solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Frieburg, Frieburg, Switzerland. He lives and works in Amsterdam.
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Schedule
from January 09, 2016 to February 20, 2016