Event

Compound Eyes on the WorldPost an Event »

Marx & Zavattero

September 11 - October 24, 2010

Info

77 Geary Street 2nd Floor San Francisco, CA 94108
Google Map »
Compound Eyes on the World What Burns Never Returns - 62" x 74" acrylic, ink, collage, & metal flake on paper on panel, 2010
Opening reception for the artist: Saturday, September 11 beginning at 5:00 PM Marx & Zavattero is proud to announce Compound Eyes on the World, Andrew Schoultz's ambitious second solo exhibition at the gallery. Inspired by the shifting nature of history as record in the past, present, and future, Schoultz's latest exhibition alludes to the tornado of information present today and the assumption that we are able to sift through the detritus to find clarity and meaning. The driving force behind this body of work straddles a line of duality between perceived reality and fiction, creating a theatrical tour de force of mixed media paintings, drawings, monotypes, and sculpture. Schoultz's expansive and sometimes mystical vision continues to investigate the ways in which we receive and process information about the world from a political and social perspective. His acrylic, metal flake, and collage paintings have reached a feverish pitch in both color and density, and he has tellingly chosen the iconic eye found on the American one dollar bill as a recurring image; it permeates this body of work. Toggling between abstraction and graphic imagery, Schoultz creates densely layered images that read abstract at a distance, and become clearer at close range. His new body of work shares an intense sense of action that is cinematic in scope, depicting enveloping worlds, moods, and atmosphere that is as lyrically mesmerizing as it is unsettling. Energetic bursts of bright, full-spectrum color, expansive surfaces, and radioactive lines combine with some of his established imagery - pools of water rippling out, cyclones, broken bridges, and blasts - producing a combination of beauty and chaos, despair and hope that is expressly linked to natural disasters, economic turmoil, war, and misuses of power. In the middle of the gallery Schoultz will construct a giant brick wall fabricated from wood, installed to appear as if it is tumbling down and crumbling before our eyes. Loaded with historical significance, the wall symbolizes centuries of power, war, and international borders. Schoultz's energy is beautifully devastating and places him at the forefront of a new category of practice in which abstraction and imagery fuse and dissolve before our very eyes. Much like the tenuous state of the world today, Schoultz has created his own aesthetics of imminent calamity. Schoultz has exhibited in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions in international and national venues, including the 10th Havana Biennial, Havana, Cuba; Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles, CA; Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, NY; V1 Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark; Jerome Zodo Contemporary, Milan; MAMA, Rotterdam, the Netherlands; European Kunsthalle and Linn Luhn, Cologne, Germany; the Torrance Art Museum; and the House of Campari, Los Angeles, CA, among many others. He was the winner of the Campari Art Award in 2009. His work has been featured in Playboy, Whitewall, The Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Artforum.com, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Juxtapoz, Arrow, Alarm, SF Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, and several other publications. His work is in the permanent collections of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and The Progressive Art Collection, Mayfield Village, OH. His street murals can be found in San Francisco and Indonesia. The artist lives and works in San Francisco.