Dutch born Pieter Holstein paints and works on paper. He attended Cooper Union (1954-57) in New York and worked at Stanley Hayter studio in Paris 1958. He showed at P.S. 1, as well as Artists Space in the late '70s.

He is most celebrated in Holland for colored etchings he produced in the '60s and '70s, which make ironic and realistic observations about the world. These deadpan comic works often play with ideas of perceiving, labeling and representing.
His earliest drawings and prints consist of delicate Kleelike figuration and deformity, also reminiscent of CoBrA art of the '50s.

His work of the last two decades has included prints of an entirely different character, notably black-and-white, densely patterned landscapes that tip over into phantasmagoria. The bold lines recall tribal carvings, taotie designs on ancient Chinese bronzes.

"His work doesn't reflect reality, but meditates on the reflection of reality", Gijs van Tuyl, Dutch curator and Director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam once wrote. That's a stance the artist amplified in his retrospective by declining to title or date most works, so that they ran together in a perceptually disorienting chatter, like a film jumping its reel.