Peter Schuyff at Mary Boone Gallery in NY

Thu, Nov 5 - Fri, Dec 18  2015

From 5 November until 18 December, Mary Boone Gallery in New York presents a solo exhibition of new paintings by Dutch artist Peter Schuyff at its Fifth Avenue location. The show is Schuyff’s first New York solo exhibition in eight years. 

Peter Schuyff

A fixture of New York’s East Village art scene in the 1980s and a prominent member of that era’s loosely defined “Neo-Geo” movement, Peter Schuyff left New York in 2003 to return to Vancouver, where he was raised. Eventually Schuyff returned to his native Holland and set up his present studio in Amsterdam.

Before computer graphics made such imagery familiar, Peter Schuyff was using paint to create abstract forms from light and shadow to depict complex patterns that warp around an irregular surface. In his new paintings, on view in the exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery, Schuyff continues to explore these spacial and optical effects. Floating orbs with checked patterns are distorted by unseen forces; arrangements of multiple orbs gyrate in loops and arcs, suggesting an underlying narrative. Pattern breaks free of geometric form in the latest group of works. Schuyff adopts recognizable plaids and patterns – even a canvas by Mondrian – to play with the idea of surface as a mutable “skin”. The paintings seem to depict billowing fabric, their convincing volumes evidence of Schuyff’s classical understanding of light and depth.

Peter Schuyff’s work 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. His work was most recently seen in New York in the 2014 Whitney Museum Biennial. A solo exhibition of his work will open at the Kunsthalle Frieburg, Frieburg, Switzerland in 2016.