Peter Schuyff

Peter Schuyff's paintings typically feature his signature undulating figures that jump around the canvas and weave through themselves. Schuyff positions these forms against realistic imagery, juxtaposing two seemingly dissimilar styles of painting. Michelle Grabner wrote that, “analysis of Schuyff's work in terms of Surrealism is not erroneous. Addressing the works' playful, charming, and strange qualities speaks to the heart of the artist's engagement with fact and fantasy, volume and flatness, abstraction and representation." In recent work, the artist has used found paintings of landscapes or nautical scenes as the ground for his compositions, virtually obscuring the content of the preexisting paintings. The dissonance between the two fields of paint speaks not to just formal and stylistic contrasts, but to critical concerns about representation and subject matter.