Pieter Schoolwerth, “Your Vacuum Blows, which Sucks”

Schoolwerth should probably be included on the long list of artists criminally omitted from MoMA’s “Forever Now” survey of contemporary painters, if for no other reason than his work is genuinely weird. His approach could be described as a compositional maelstrom in which figurative fragments and objects vanish into a wormhole of Photoshoplike effects and abstract flourishes, as if Stephen Hawking were channeling Francis Bacon or vice versa. The show’s title refers to an epiphany the artist had while cleaning his house with a subpar vacuum cleaner, which, he realized, “sucked” in both senses of the word. This duality of meaning becomes the theme for his latest show of paintings and drawings, as well as a video also called Your Vacuum Blows, which Sucks.