PRESENTATION:Andrew Schoultz-Linescapes
Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Andrew Schoultz became a professional skateboarder before moving to San Francisco in 1998, where the vocabulary of his outdoor murals – wooden war horses, limb-less trees, erupting volcanoes, tornadoes, clouds of flying arrows – has become an important part of the urban fabric in the Mission District and beyond. This vocabulary extends to paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installations.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Hosfelt Gallery Archive
Andrew Schoultz utilizes a signature style of densely-packed, meticulously-rendered motifs – archaic war machines, the iconography of the American Dollar bill, and cataclysmic events, both natural and man-made – to represent the turmoil of the contemporary world. He makes historic references to antique etchings and Persian miniature painting as well as to William T. Wiley, M. C. Escher and Mission School street art*. But Schoultz’s art is very much his own – an intense vision of a planet threatened by overcrowding and overconsumption and societies under siege by the governments that are there to protect them. For his solo exhibition “Linescapes”, 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 Hosfelt 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.
* The Mission School (sometimes called “New Folk” or “Urban Rustic”) is an art movement of the 1990s and 2000s, centered in the Mission District, San Francisco, California. This movement is generally considered to have emerged in the early 1990s around a core group of artists who attended (or were associated with) San Francisco Art Institute. The term “Mission School”, however, was not coined until 2002, in an article by Glen Helfand.
Photo: Andrew Schoultz, Golden Owl at Golden Hour, 2025, acrylic, graphite and collage on canvas, 24 x 24 in, 61 x 61 cm, © Andrew Schoultz, Courtesy the artist and Hosfelt Gallery
Info: Hosfelt Gallery, 260 Utah Street, San Francisco, CA, USA, Duration: 29/3-10/5/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sat 10:00-17:30, Thu 11:00-19:00, https://hosfeltgallery.com/
