Thinking Through (13 Years): Pieter Schoolwerth

Thinking Through (13 Years) unfolds from the gallery’s website archive, recasting thirteen years of exhibitions as a mutable script of images, gestures, and recollections.

At the heart of the project are two bodies of work that double and echo each other. First, a series of small paintings, quick gestural condensations of each gallery year, gathered into a one third scale model of K-T Z itself. Here the viewer looks down into memory, as if peering through the aerial logic of SketchUp or the database structure of an online archive. Opposing these, large canvases derived from the small works stretch across the gallery’s exterior walls. These are not straightforward enlargements but translations: the modest studies photographed, embedded into 3D models, printed onto canvas, and then reinscribed with paint, with exaggerated brushstrokes. The result is a hybrid surface of hand and machine, pixel and brushstroke, where authorship is dispersed and unsettled.

This recursive passage, small to large, model to gallery, hand to printer, enacts the instability of memory itself. Details collapse, return, or distort. A delicate mark scaled up becomes a swaggering gesture, just as a private photo posted online becomes a public sign. Schoolwerth’s “Z-axis” space, composed in CGI FX software, places painting in dialogue with the shallow, simulated depth familiar to gaming and other virtual environments - through which we now navigate images daily.

Within this shifting ground, models take on multiple roles at once: archive, artwork, and orientation device. They structure the viewer’s relation to time and space while refusing any fixed position. The exhibition becomes not a monument to the gallery’s past but a meditation on how we remember now—through websites, databases, screenshots, and fragments. Each painting acts like a souvenir of the corresponding year’s program - some fragments clearly ‘remembered’ in passages of oil paint, others ‘forgotten’ and lost to photographic reproduction - like a collage of compressed time memorialized in a calendar.