Has Been

Has Been is a selection of works created by Dutch painter Peter Schuyff between 1981 and 1991. This exhibition, organised jointly with the Consortium in Dijon, is the first retrospective look at the artist’s career. Arriving in New York in the early 1980s, Schuyff brought into play the countless stories of abstraction by drawing on a vocabulary then considered exhausted.

The exhibition reveals the many different paths taken by the artist and exposes the myriad forms which abstraction can take. Here, appropriation fuses with extravagant, abstract neo-surrealism, trompe l’œil effects are skilfully used to produce impressive depths of field, and hard, geometric patterns become wilfully pliant and rakish.

Overpainted Paintings are a series of works in which Schuyff adds abstract and organic motifs to figurative art found in junk shops. In doing so, the artist subverts the norms that traditionally govern the pictorial space.