Crisis

Milano, 11/03 – 30/04, 2010

Jerome Zodo Contemporary, Milan, is proud to present a solo exhibition of new work by San Francisco based artist Andrew Schoultz.

Working in a vernacular that combines the energy of street art, art historical references, and incisive political commentary, San Francisco-based artist Andrew Schoultz will debut Crisis, an exciting installation of interrelated painting and sculpture. Schoultz, who is noted for his highly detailed outdoor murals and works of a similar vein on canvas, panel, paper, and sculptural installations, will create major new works specifically for the dynamic new Jerome Zodo Contemporary space.
Schoultz’s signature imagery — Trojan horses in battle, piles of lumber, broken bridges, pluming tornadoes, subjugating figures, trees laced with American and Foreign currency, tears, Arabic scripts, and fiery portals — are often overlaid by an energetic vortex of brightly painted lines, dots, and collage creating a web-like sheath.
The core of the new exhibition is a powerful installation consisting of a pile of telephone pole-like structures that appear to have been toppled and strewn about the room.
At once a reference to a breakdown in telecommunication systems, in light of recent events in Haiti, the installation is an even more powerful vision of natural and political disaster.
In the spirit of the urgency of his themes, Schoultz employs a plethora of artistic forms and styles including graffiti, medieval cartography, Indian miniature painting, and ancient woodcuts, as well as collages a variety of coded elements into his work. The expansive paintings include fragments of actual currency, cancelled stock certificates, antique papers and etchings, as well as his cut-up pieces of his own work. The results find great beauty in tumultuousness.
The show will include more than a dozen large scale works–interrelated painting, sculpture, and installation that cohere into visual.

Andrew Schoultz (1975, WI) received his BFA from the Academy of Art University, San Francisco (CA). He has had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Copenhagen, Philadelphia, Rotterdam, Boston, London, Portland, Detroit and Milan. He has been included in group exhibitions at the Andy Warhol Museum (PA), Torrance Art Museum (CA), Havana Biennial (Cuba), Hyde Park Arts Center (IL), Laguna Art Museum (CA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), among others. His work can be seen in the public collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), Frederick R. Weisman Foundation (CA) and the Progressive Art Collection (OH), in addition to his publicly funded murals in Portland (ME), Jogjakarta (Indonesia) and San Francisco (CA). Schoultz lives and works in San Francisco (CA).

Sourcing inspiration from 15th Century German map making and Indian miniature paintings, Andrew Schoultz’s frenetic imagery depicts an ephemeral history bound to repeat itself. In his mixed-media works, notions of war, spirituality and sociopolitical imperialism are reoccurring themes, which shrewdly parallel an equally repetitive contemporary pursuit of accumulation and power. Intricate line work, painting, metal leaf and collage twist and undulate under Schoultz’s meticulous hand, ranging from intimately sized wall works to staggering murals and installations. While his illustrated world seems one of chaos and frenzy, Schoultz also implies a sense of alluring fantasy and whimsy – a crossroads vaguely familiar to the modern world. In 2013 he will exhibit at the Monterey Museum of Art ( CA).