Andrew Schoultz: Linescapes

Reception for the artist: Saturday, March 29, 3–5 pm, with a curatorial walkthrough at 4 pm.

For his fifth solo exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery, Los Angeles-based Andrew Schoultz leans into his long-standing practice as a street muralist to transform the gallery into an environment of optically vibrating wall paintings.   Inspired by mid-20th-century Op Art, Schoultz's installation is an architecturally scaled metaphor for the complex, unstable and anxiety-inducing world we currently find ourselves in.

During the course of the show, Schoultz will return to the gallery and add additional layers of pattern to the murals, changing them dramatically,  further illustrating the idea that we live in a time of unpredictability. 

Within the framework of the installation, Schoultz hangs paintings of creatures with ancient cross-cultural associations that are often important as protective talismans.   For example, the snake, depending on one's culture, religion, or politics, can denote protection, wisdom, healing, treachery (think snake in the grass) or anti-government resistance. 

The owl is the traditional companion of the goddesses Athena (associated with wisdom and skill) and Lakshmi (who, with Vishnu, creates, protects, and transforms the universe) and, in the West, is symbolic of knowledge and magic.  The bull represents strength and virility-as well as a booming stock market.  There's the maxim of grabbing one by the horns, a macho flaunting of control or power… but the brute's presence in a china shop is also a metaphor for tone-deafness, negligence and wanton destruction.   

Schoultz situates these icons within a space that vibrates and shimmers with obsessive, hand-painted linework.  It's an environment that can be disorienting and dizzying-but one that's also energetic, warm and vibrant.  It's an installation that envelops the viewer in a playful and protective aura, while surrounding us with amulets of hope for protection, wisdom, healing and strength.  

Born in 1975 in Milwaukee, Schoultz was a professional skateboarder before moving to San Francisco in 1998.  The vocabulary of his outdoor murals-wooden warhorses, limbless trees, tornadoes, beasts, clouds of smoke, and flying arrows-has become an important part of the urban fabric in Northern and Southern California and around the world.  His work has been extensively exhibited and acquired by important public and private collections internationally.  He lives and works in Los Angeles.