Andrew Schoultz: Linescapes

Reception: Saturday March 29, 3-5pm, with a curatorial walkthrough at 4pm

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.

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 upon 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 line work.  It's an environment that can be disorienting and dizzying - but one that's also energetic, warm and vibrant.  It's an installation that envelopes 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 war horses, limb-less 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 currently lives and works in Los Angeles.