Month: March 2008

Andrew Schoultz


Andrew Schoultz
Chaotic Balance On Well Built Structures

For Andrew Schoultz, art is an uncontrollable passion and obsession. This is apparent, among other things, in the abundance of paintings, drawings, murals, installations, photos, graffiti and sculptures he produces.

Since 1997 he has been working out of San Francisco on big murals, which have become his trademark. They resemble a fusion of political comic strips of Doctor Seuss, the social awareness of the Chicano Muralism, and the erratic reality of protest and beauty. The symbolic images in his paintings refer to Christian iconography, miniatures from the Middle- East, medieval maps and his reinterpretation of folk art. In that way arise an output of an apocalyptic world full of chaos, chimeras and fantasies; bizarre political landscapes filtered through the matrix of graffiti and comic strips.

The artist comments with his work on the themes from world history that he believes continually repeat themselves, such as war, colonialism and the relationship between mankind and nature that must be constantly reinvented due to changing technologies.

Especially for this exhibition Schoultz will create murals and objects in the Showroom of MAMA. Moreover, this first solo presentation of Schoultz in the Netherlands concludes a few new drawings from 2008.

Showroommama

BENNY DRoSCHER at Blindarte Contemporanea, Napoli.




“I am so tired of being an atheist” is the title of Dröscher’s recently commissioned sculpture for the city centre of Copenhagen, in which he tackles one of the most interesting concepts of his artistic research: the alternate relationship between art and our desire to believe in something beyond the everyday. This theme is presented also in the artworks of his first solo show at Blindarte Contemporanea, Naples.
The look of a sky that is looked at is the title of the exhibition. Dröscher thinks of his work as meditation on time and eternity. In the composition of his new paintings, with trees tapering away
into the distance, Dröscher suggests that the viewer is lying beneath a fantastical forest canopy gazing into the abyss searching for meaning. Dröschers new sculptures are placed between reality
and representation, where there is doubt about how the world is turning, and whether we’re really seeing and interpreting it correctly.
The unreal composition of everyday objects and surrealist images of nature, such as trees, birds, butterflies, fountains, implies a strong longing for something beyond the mundane and a dreamlike state through which Dröscher dares to imagine the possibility of a transcendent meaning.
The artist’s research is directed to demonstrate that visual art might be an inadequate language for illustrating the divine and what Dröscher wants is to create an engagement with reality unencumbered by ideas and prejudices. Things don’t tell stories; they create situations. His artworks, realized with different and non-conventional materials seem kitsch only externally: Dröschers art has a strange way of overcoming the superficial look of what’s in front of us.
The evident ambiguity between real and artificial, the reference to the nature and the use and reuse of everyday materials involve the spectators in their heart of hearts to read the personal experiences. All this is completed by a keen humour, an essential condition of Dröscher artworks, which he shows with a wise addition of the work’s title. The magic of Dröscher’s artpieces, heavy with a mystic symbolism, and their spirituality are the fruit of the “sense of wonder”, the starting point of the Danish artists research.

Biographical notes:

Benny Dröscher lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark.
He has exhibited recently in the following galleries: Rokeby, London; Mogadishni, Copenhagen; Fiebach & Minniger, Cologne; Specta, Copenhagen. He has exhibited in museums an art spaces such as: The Danish National Gallery,Copenhagen; Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden; Arken, Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark; Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Norway; Sparwasser, Berlin, Germany; Museum Trapholt, Denmark; Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum,Denmark; Nikolaj Contemporary Art Centre, Copenhagen, Denmark.His artworks are included in public collections such as: Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden, Arken, Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; The Danish National Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark; Statens Kunstfond (Danish Endowment for Visual Art); Kastrupgaardsamlingen, Denmark; Nykredit, Denmark; NoVo Nordica, Denmark. Private collections in: Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

Blindarte