Hosfelt Gallery

For his fifth solo exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery, Los Angeles-based 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. 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. Born in 1975 in Milwaukee, Schoultz was a professional skateboarder before moving to San Francisco in 1998. The vocabulary of his outdoor murals—wooden warhorses, limbless trees, tornadoes, beasts, clouds of smoke, and flying arrows—has become an important part of the urban fabric in Northern and Southern California and around the world. His work has been extensively exhibited and acquired by important public and private collections internationally. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

One of the most innovative and influential artists to come out of the Bay Area, William T. Wiley (1937-2021), used wordplay, virtuosic painting and his encyclopedic knowledge of art history to address current social, political and environmental issues. In this exhibition of paintings on canvas and paper from the 1990s, Wiley employs quotations from Bosch and Bruegel, Warhol and Whistler, Mondrian and Manet, as he reflects on the absurdity of the human condition. Though his signature style was wholly original and always entirely recognizable, Wiley audaciously and gleefully "stole" from both his predecessors and his peers. Sometimes he was reverent; sometimes he was cheeky. Always, he was empathetic, in his open-ended investigations of the moral responsibility of the global citizen. Though 30 years old, the works selected for this exhibition grapple with many of the same topics that are in our current headlines — environmental degradation, inequality, the horrors of war, and governments that fail their people. William T. Wiley was born in 1937 and moved to San Francisco in 1956 to attend the San Francisco Art Institute (then the California School of Fine Arts). He completed his MFA in 1962, then taught at UC Davis, where he, along with Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, and Manuel Neri, transformed what was known as an agricultural college into one of the most important art schools of the 1960s and 1970s. In 2009 the Smithsonian American Art Museum mounted a retrospective of Wiley's work that traveled to the Berkeley Art Museum in 2010. In 2013 Wiley was the subject of a major solo exhibition at the Fondazione Marconi in Milan. During the 2013 Venice Biennale, Wiley's work was included in the Prada Foundation's remake of the legendary exhibition, When Attitude Becomes Form, originally curated by Harald Szeemann at the Bern Kunsthalle, Switzerland in 1969. Wiley's paintings, works on paper, sculptures and films are in the permanent collections of nearly every museum in the United States as well as dozens of institutions internationally.

Düsseldorf-based Jutta Haeckel paints on jute - the strong, coarse, natural fiber that burlap is made of - and utilizes a series of unorthodox techniques to undermine and expand traditional notions of painting. Most notably, she applies pigments to the "backside" of the painting, then pushes it through small gaps she's created in the fabric - extruding the paint onto the "front" and subverting the two-dimensional space of traditional painting. These are paintings unlike anything anyone has ever made. Her newest work aggressively emphasizes the concept of the canvas as a permeable membrane, or skin. Viscous material is forced back and forth across a porous barrier. The woven substrate is so powerfully abraded that at moments it seems about to unravel. Some of these paintings appear to have too little canvas to support the weight of the paint they support. Haeckel's process is risky. Every move she makes in the studio has the potential of either dynamic creation or complete destruction. That precariousness is what drives her art. Haeckel studied with Karin Kneffel and Katharina Grosse and credits their vastly different approaches to painting with her own fascination with the medium's possibilities. "I don't believe that everything is already accomplished, I think evolution is always possible. It starts with just a little variation and suddenly it could become something new or unique. This is why I always force myself to search for the boundaries of painting and the boundaries of the materials I am working with." Join us for the artist's opening reception on Saturday, February 1, from 3:00 to 5:00 PM.

Anoka Faruqee and David Driscoll’s collaborative paintings use misaligned concentric circles to explore moiré patterns, merging light, form, and data. Grounded in physics and color theory, their works challenge traditional ideas of authorship.

Conner’s magic marker drawings, 1963–1975, showcase his innovative use of automatic drawing techniques. These psychedelic works, reflecting the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, demonstrate Conner’s exploration of line, form, and spirituality.

Sculptures by electronic art pioneer Alan Rath, examining the relationship between human nature and technology. Rath’s meticulously crafted works use robotics, video animation, and found materials, blurring the line between living and electronic.

Rina Banerjee's art merges personal and global narratives, exploring themes of colonialism, migration, and environmental conservation. Her eclectic sculptures and vivid paintings challenge traditional boundaries, focusing on fundamental human rights and envisioning a more ethical world order. Her fourth solo presentation at Hosfelt Gallery underscores the right to live free from oppression and hope for change

Alexandre Kyungu Mwilambwe lives and works in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. He appropriates found objects — rubber tire inner tubes, doors, antiquated maps — and the vocabulary of traditional body modification (Nzoloko, or scarification, a pre-colonial tradition that continues in contemporary Congolese society) to explore identity, the legitimacy of political boundaries, and the possibility of mobility in a post-colonial world. Combining Nzoloko marks with the language of cartography, Kyungu Mwilambwe’s practice ranges freely between painting, drawing, sculpture and installation. The found materials he works upon — old doors, used vehicle tires, or obsolete maps — serve as both physical and conceptual substructures for his artworks. The objects themselves are metaphors for the ability to pass from one place to another, to transport the self or belongings, and to find your place in the world. He incises, abrades, and gouges into these historical objects in what he refers to as "cartographic essays," that aim to represent a new, more open, global world order. Alexandre Kyungu Mwilambwe (b. 1993, Democratic Republic of the Congo) studied art at the Kinshasa Academy of Fine Arts. He is co-founder of the Vision Total group and recipient of international fellowships including the WIELS residency in Brussels, Belgium. His work has been presented at the Capesaro Museum in Venice in conjunction with Biennale d'Architecture di Venezia, in Paris in collaboration with AKKA Project, and at the Dakar Biennale. This is his first solo exhibition in the United States.

The California artist Tim Hawkinson is renowned for transforming everyday materials into objects that are as uncanny as they are poetic. Through virtuoso craftsmanship and the use of peculiar materials and drastic shifts in scale, he unsettles our expectations and startles us into perceiving the world anew. This exhibition of 30 tiny paintings — yes, paintings — made between 2021 and 2023 is utterly unlike — yet completely consistent with — the expansive body of work he has created over the last 35 years. On wooden panels about the size of a paperback novel, Hawkinson recounts fleeting moments from his family’s life. They’re hyperreal images based on iPhone photos he, his wife (the artist Patty Wickman), or their daughter have taken. A few are posed; most are candid. He depicts his aged father trimming his toenails, his wife reading in bed, his daughter asleep in the backseat of the car after a college tour, and several unflattering selfies in a bathroom mirror. We watch as his father moves toward death and his daughter becomes an adult. There’s a can’t-look-away-ness to many of these pictures, a relentless, cringey intimacy that’s both frightening and tender. Hawkinson is famous for work that refers to, is cast from, or is composed of bits — like nail clippings or hair — of his own body. In this work, he adds the bodies of his father and daughter — extensions of himself into the future and back into the past. He reveals his joy in the domestic, his bewilderment at empty-nesting, and the shock of watching himself age. In his most personal work yet, Hawkinson describes ordinary moments in one family’s life, and so doing, expresses our common humanity. Tim Hawkinson was born in San Francisco in 1960 and received his BFA from San Jose State University before moving to the Los Angeles area (MFA 1989, University of California, Los Angeles), where he is currently based. Hawkinson's work has been exhibited internationally with solo museum shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., among others. His work is in numerous collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art; San Jose Museum of Art, California; J. Paul Getty Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.