Andrew Schoultz’s art is filled with chaotic imagery, expressing a rather dystopian vision through a variety of techniques, from sculpture to collage, street art to installations to paintings. Featured here on our blog, his eclectic work cultivates an arsenal of personal symbolism: fragments of dollar bills, fractured Grecian urns, ripped American flags, war horses, and slave ships are just a few of the symbols he uses to juxtapose Western culture with allusions to conflict and exploitation.
For his first solo at Josuhua Liner Gallery in New York, “Age of Empire”, Schoultz created a new series of paintings, works on paper, and a site-specific installation. His signature abstract and geometric patterns appear here as undulating, gradient bands of color, meant to represent the artist’s varied perspectives of war and politics. Many works feature the motif of maps, combined with images of all-seeing eyes, war and viking iconography next to neon-colored exploding trees, collaged with domestic and foreign currency.
“Chaos and destruction are reoccurring themes in my work because I feel like these things are happening all around us constantly,” Schoultz says. “Whether it is the multiple wars being fought all over the world, the natural disasters that seem to happen on a regular basis, the man-made environmental disasters that are becoming more and more prevalent, to the economic crisis that has been crushing this country’s poor and middle class for years. I feel like you really cannot talk about one of these things without talking about all of them, so it becomes a monster of a subject.”
Andrew Schoultz’s “Age of Empire” is on view at Joshua Liner Gallery in New York through May 27th, 2016.