Inside Peter Schuyff’s World – Geometry, Colour, and the Legacy of Neo-Geo Painting
- Feb 6
- 6 min read
Michael Klein is best known for his work and achievements in the field of contemporary art. As both a dealer and curator, he has had a long and distinguished career as a New York gallery owner and director, representing an international roster of emerging and mid-career artists. He became the first in-house curator for Microsoft Corp.
In the early ’80s, the East Village, a Manhattan neighborhood, was the epicenter of experimental art and new talent, a neighborhood and movement now some 40 years ago. The neighborhood blossomed into a community of artists, writers, and musicians. The area was slowly being gentrified, storefronts emerged as boutiques and cafes, and new galleries, many run by artists, opened, including Nature Morte, International with Monument, and Fun Gallery, home to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Jeff Koons, too, began his career in this setting. Many of these enterprising galleries opened on Sundays, gaining a following of collectors curious about this new art but busy in Soho on Saturdays.
I discovered Schuyff’s work on one of those Sundays, seeing it in a group show at B Side Gallery in 1982. I came home with a great work, a found painting framed in an ornate gold frame. My partner at the time was shocked that I found something in the East Village to my liking. My interests at the time were focused on Post Minimal work and conceptual art championed by dealers in Soho and Midtown.
The painting is a combination of found image and painted surface, typical of what became a trademark of Schuyff’s hand. The picture is a found black and white portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven, mounted on wood and framed in a second-hand shop gold frame. Typical of his “Overpaintings,” Schuyff inserted his own painted biomorphic shape, red, yellow, and blue in color, which seems to hover in the space between the picture below and the painting’s surface. It is this tension between figure and ground, black and white and color, pictorial realism and painterly abstraction that, to the viewer, is simultaneously soothing and alarming. I was also curious about the link between time past and present proposed by the work. In many of his “found” paintings, I would later learn that the past is revitalized in the present. It was this inherent tension, a challenge between what is given and what is imagined, that caught my attention and made me buy the painting on the spot for $200.00.
Schuyff’s career grew rapidly, with many solo and group shows, including those in Europe and Japan. One particular exhibition that stood out for me was organized by Adelina von Furstenberg, Director, in 1987 at the Centre d’art contemporain Geneva. A year later, he appeared on the cover of Artnews in March 1988, a significant accomplishment for this 30-year-old artist.
He was, and still is, a unique talent. Abstraction is the lifeblood of Schuyff’s work, underscored by “complex geometric patterns, and in these patterns is a mysterious light that illuminates the surface of his canvases.” He plays with light to define space, to create space, or to give a painting a certain atmosphere. The surface is flat, yet there can be great depth or the illusion of space, bringing the viewer closer to the geometric system being portrayed. Each canvas feels alive, as if illuminated from a secret interior source.
Pat Hearn, the East Village entrepreneur, along with Soho grand master Leo Castelli, presented his works, along with other notable art dealers such as Larry Gagosian, Paul Kasmin, and Mary Boone. In spite of this attention, Schuyff has remained modest in a culture that seeks stardom as a goal. I know him to remain extremely focused on his work, not fame.
Peter and I got to know each other in New York. I remember a studio visit on 14th Street, when I had to find him in order for him to sign the painting I had bought. We later lost track of each other, though I followed his career from afar until we were both, by chance, living and working on the West Coast. Peter was living and teaching in Vancouver, B.C., having arrived in 2003, and I was in Seattle, Washington, serving as Curator of the Microsoft Art Collection. I learned that he was out west from a mutual friend, so I called Peter, made several studio visits, and our friendship was rekindled. The result was that I acquired a terrific abstraction for the Microsoft collection, and later a series of seven works on paper, watercolors, in fact.
Peter stayed in Vancouver for a few years and then moved back to his native Holland. He was born there in 1958 and now makes his home in Amsterdam and Bari, Italy.
I have continued to follow his work and, when possible, acquire pieces, both paintings and works on paper. Over the years, we got to know each other better, though I never showed his work in my gallery, which I still do not know why.
Labelled by many as Neo-Geo, short for Neo-geometric conceptualism, the term came into use in the early 1980s in America to describe artists who criticized the mechanization and commercialism of the modern world. Schuyff has taken this further by exploring a vast array of geometries in tandem with a strong sense of color. The variants range from simple grids to complex arrangements, proportioned patterns laid out as flat fields or painted to suggest the illusion of depth and space. Color may be chosen from nature or based on artificial light. There is no single formula, but rather an ongoing study and interpretation of patterns. As Schuyff explained in the Artnews article, he seeks to inspire the viewer. To do so, he actively explores all the possibilities of geometry and his passion for color, luminescent, provocative, and moving. Each canvas is energized by his color choices. At the same time, he may employ light infused within the geometry to draw the viewer closer to the work.
Recent solo shows combine works composed of patterns and optical illusions from the 1980s through his most recent pieces, revealing the evolution of his study of light. In 2017, a survey of Schuyff’s work from 1981 to 1989 was shown at Le Consortium in Dijon. Other recent shows include the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Whitney Biennial in New York, and galleries such as Almine Rech in Brussels and White Cube in London.
Last year in Bari, Italy, he was invited to the exhibition Peter Schuyff, Available Light / Luce Disponibile at the Fondazione Museo Pino Pascali. It was a mini survey that included classic works from the 1980s alongside more recent pieces, illustrating the evolution of his study of light, space, and texture.
Most recently, he produced two elegant shows with Massimo di Carlo and his galleries in Milan and London. The London show presents a selection of recent paintings, each an intimate study in and about abstraction. The artist Simon Linke has written eloquently about these works, and I quote his comments here:
If Schuyff’s paintings contain a “story,” it is one that orbits process, the alchemy of colour as light, its quasi-spiritual resonances, and the regulating discipline of the grid. Together, these form a kind of conceptual triumvirate. This story sits outside the paintings rather than being generated from within them. It operates as an art-historical and theoretical framing device, invoking modernism’s utopian aspirations, the legacy of mediated imagery, and the translation of perception into a system. These are rich and legible signifiers, and when taken together, they read as a philosophical proposition about abstraction and its historical ambitions.
It is Schuyff’s instinct for rhythmic structure, combined with his explorations in color, that makes these works both unique and highly relatable through their clarity and balance. Through his paintings and works on paper, he continues the now century-long Modernist tradition of experimentation and individual expression. As noted in a review from a few years ago, “…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.”
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Michael Klein, Owner & Director at Michael Klein Arts, LLC
Michael Klein's expertise lies in his role as a private art dealer and freelance, independent curator for individuals, institutions, and arts organizations. Today, Michael Klein Arts works with a diverse group of artists, estates, galleries, and non-profit institutions, providing management, curatorial, and other consulting services. At the same time, the company serves institutional as well as private collectors, focusing on developing collections of emerging, mid-career, and established artists. The company also organizes traveling exhibitions both in the United States and abroad.
