Featured image: Success, Simone Schiffmacher, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 20 x 24 in. / 50.8 x 60.96 cm.
Simone Schiffmacher’s paintings Vanity, Socializing, and Growing Wealth translate digital processes into physical form, examining how contemporary perception is shaped by screens, compression, and mediated imagery.
Simone Schiffmacher creates abstract paintings from low-resolution 3D models, exploring how digital media alters perception, identity, and visual experience.
Derived from 3D models and intentionally reduced in resolution, these works transform the logic of pixels into hand-painted grids and color fields. The result is a visual language that sits between abstraction and representation, where clarity is disrupted and meaning emerges through fragmentation. Schiffmacher’s practice interrogates how digital interfaces reshape not only what we see, but how we interpret and construct reality.
Vanity, Simone Schiffmacher, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 in. / 121.92 x 121.92 cm.
Vanity presents a symmetrical, almost mirrored composition constructed from a dense grid of muted color blocks. The arrangement suggests a human figure or reflection, yet the image resists full recognition due to its pixelated structure. Soft gradients of pinks, grays, and browns create depth, while the geometric segmentation flattens the form, emphasizing surface over illusion. The title introduces a conceptual layer, pointing to self-perception in the digital age, where identity is filtered, compressed, and reconstructed through screens. The painting’s balance between structure and distortion reflects the instability of self-image when mediated through technology.
Socializing, Simone Schiffmacher, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 17 in. / 60.96 x 43.18 cm.
In Socializing, Schiffmacher overlays translucent, rounded rectangular forms across a pixelated background, evoking the visual language of digital interfaces, chat bubbles, windows, and notifications. The composition is less symmetrical than Vanity, instead operating through layered interaction. The muted palette, punctuated by subtle shifts in tone, creates a sense of depth without fully resolving spatial relationships. The semi-transparent shapes obscure and reveal the grid beneath, suggesting the fragmented nature of communication in digital environments. Interaction becomes abstracted, reduced to overlapping signals rather than direct human presence, reinforcing the idea that social exchange is increasingly mediated and diffused.
Growing Wealth, Simone Schiffmacher, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 in. / 121.92 x 121.92 cm.
Growing Wealth shifts toward a more dynamic composition, where the pixel grid is arranged in diagonal, wave-like patterns. The palette transitions into greens, blacks, and neutral tones, evoking associations with growth, finance, and organic expansion. The rhythmic undulation of the grid introduces movement, suggesting accumulation or fluctuation over time. Despite its abstract nature, the work implies systems, financial, digital, or ecological, operating beneath the surface. The pixelation disrupts clarity, emphasizing that wealth, like digital imagery, is often perceived through layers of abstraction and distortion rather than direct experience.
Across these three works, Simone Schiffmacher constructs a consistent investigation into the relationship between digital mediation and human perception. By translating low-resolution digital imagery into carefully rendered paintings, she exposes the mechanics behind contemporary visual experience. The grid becomes both structure and subject, representing the frameworks through which reality is filtered and understood. Whether addressing identity, communication, or systems of value, Schiffmacher’s work reveals a world increasingly shaped by compression, fragmentation, and reinterpretation.