Peter Schuyff

Half Gallery is pleased to present New Paintings, Peter Schuyff’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Since the late ’80s, the abstract artist has made waves with his mind-bending visuality and his graphic, ironic twists on avant-garde painting. Schuyff was in Pat Hearn’s first exhibition in 1983, as well as many others (Hearn’s gallery was then located at Avenue B and 6th Street), just a hop away from Half Gallery’s new location.

Bill Powers: Is serialization an aspect of your practice?

Peter Schuyff: I’m fascinated by paintings of paintings, and paintings of drawings, and drawings of paintings. I love that echo. Some of my abstract paintings are almost cartoons of paintings or caricatures of paintings. It’s important for me to limit what I’m responsible for. If I paint on top of a found painting, I can kind of have my cake and eat it, too. It distills what there is left to do.

BP: Which reminds me of Marcel Duchamp talking about painting on glass, which he loved because he suspected too many backgrounds in paintings were done without real intent.

PS: I’m definitely at my best when I dumb it down. When I get out of the way. I tend to get in trouble when I have a “bright idea.”

BP: Do you think of your paintings as having a temperature?

PS: All of my life, I’ve only used six or seven tubes of paint. I don’t think of myself as a colorist. That’s not how I express myself.

BP: Interesting that you are a literalist. So does that make your paintings room temperature?

PS: Lately I’ve been trying to paint some heat. I always start with a grisaille and then build layers of color on top of that. More recently, I’m starting with color, which is such a simple and obvious thing to do in a really Old-Master way.

BP: Do you imagine your paintings have a geography to them, or do they exist solely in fictional space?

PS: They only exist where they are. They’re not pictures of somewhere else. It’s paint.

Peter Schuyff was born in Baarn, Netherlands in 1958. In 2017, Fri Art, Kunsthalle Fribourg, Switzerland, and Le Consortium, Dijon, France, both presented ‘Has Been’, a retrospective of Schuyff’s work made between 1981 and 1989. His public exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial, New York (2014); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2005); and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, US (1996). His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and The Fisher Landau Foundation, New York. He currently lives and works in the Netherlands.