Peter Schuyff - Has Been : Le Consortium, Dijon, France

Has Been assembles a selection of works created in New York between 1983 and 1988 by the Dutch painter Peter Schuyff, born in 1958 in Baarn, in The Netherlands. This exhibition, which Le Consortium organises together with the Kunsthalle Fri Art in Fribourg, Switzerland, functions as the first retrospective gaze on the first part of the artist’s career.

Most of the paintings are shown in Fribourg (February 11 - June 18, 2017) and Dijon for the first time in more than thirty years. Even though they have been exhibited in important institutions at the time (the galleries Pat Hearn in New York and Paul Maenz in Cologne or at the Centre d’art contemporain de Genève), these works have remained out of the public eye and their reproductions had almost stopped circulating.
This generous panorama recounting the development of the artist’s practice, from his first paintings with acrylics, called "biomorphic" and instilled with a very particular kind of humour, dating from 1983, to the large abstract and pared-down compositions of 1988. The exhibition narrates a short period of time during which Schuyff constantly redefined his emerging visual language, appearing on several overlapping series. The retrospective is supplemented by a group of recent sculptures undertaken on whole tree trunks. These totems represent organic and cartoonesque forms. It is as if they had invited themselves, as a three-dimensional echoes, to join all the artist’s early "biomorphic" paintings.