Artists

William Schaeuble

Press release

The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills up what remains.[i] For the past forty-eight hours or so, I've been theoretically, psychologically, inhabiting the high, expansive Iowa skylines and "hunchbacked" pastures of the work of young [noted as "twenty-somethingish"] American painter, and self-determined "amateur outdoorsman" William Schaeuble, And it's doing funny things to my inner-linear-perception-of-time, reflexive-temporal-memory, surreal night-dreaming, general sense of day-time-absurdity, and universal-impossibility-conjunctions. Explain please… I suppose I might try… Firstly… well it could be helpful to begin by attempting an unpacking of the evocative if somewhat abstruse exhibition title, Warren County Skyline, of William Schaeuble's first solo exhibition outside the USA, auspiciously at mother's tankstation | London, 5 June -18 July, 2026. Warren County is the name of no less than fourteen counties in the USA… "most of which are named after General Joseph Warren, who was killed in the Battle of Bunker Hill during the American Revolutionary War" [ii]. Given that Schaeuble was born, as suggested above, and lives and works (we hadn't got to that bit) in rural Iowa, although I'm sure the other thirteen counties are very nice, in this instance let's assume that we are talking about Warren County, Iowa. Which, as of the last census (2020), boasted a population of 52,403 (the three of which, presumably, being William and his siblings). And indeed was named after the above-mentioned General Warren (upon further looking up the other thirteen, as which might be excluded; none of them were, actually[iii]). Its county seat and largest city, not familiar to moi, being Indianola, Warren County, Iowa, sports a total area of five-hundred-and-seventy three square miles (1,500 km2)[iv], of which of five-hundred-and-seventy square miles (1,480 km2) are land, and three-and-a-half (9.1 km2), equalling 0.6%, being water… all of which might perhaps be taken up by Schaeuble's distinctive black, landlocked lakes. Adjacent counties to Warren, being, as we spin clockwise, giddily, around the compass; Polk (named after the eleventh POTUS), Marion (named after a General in the Revolutionary War, there's a surprise now), Lucas (named after the twelfth Governor of Ohio), Clarke (named after a Revolutionary War hero – they just keep on coming) and Madison (fourth POTUS…) – there's a pattern building here; tradition, nationhood, war and presidents. 2020 recorded 19,616 households in Warren County (Iowa) – which in Schaeuble's visualisation, are generally sheltered in detached, and very—-widely—–spaced, (tiny, in extreme distance the viewer…) white, double-storied buildings, sometimes on fire[v] – of which 47.1% are situated in rural areas… yup, that statistic also looks about right, according to the pool of around thirty paintings I've seen to date and am consequently using as my own Schaeuble census… There's no apparent census record of lake/pond numbers, or 'Schaeuble' trees – they too are quite distinctive, in or out of leaf, they have resolute structure and symmetry, sometimes housing cats and/or dogs. Notwithstanding, lots of empty-hunchbacked-hilly-space, spacious fields contained by pretty feeble-looking picket fences – that are keeping nothing in or out, of which habit fills the rest. Small birds, some geese and plenty more dogs… Dogs in the foreground, dogs in the middle distance, tiny dogs, right at the back. Dogs being carried. What do we gather are William Schaeuble's habits? As evidenced by the presumed level of 'autobiography' within his paintings: I have yet to meet the esteemed Mr. Schaeuble, so can only go on the assumption of a level of painterly self-narrative, over mad, shall we say, (patently and gloriously ridiculous) invention – I have, however, never seen cats barn dance. Yet this all seems relatively plausible in William Schaeuble's very particular Warren County. Apart from liking dogs, we glean that the Schaeuble brothers are keen amateur pugilists, and wrestlers (of what looks like the old school Greco-Roman style), and hunters… I don't know if that one carries an amateur status? Unlike hunters in Jesse Homer French paintings, I have yet to witness anything that they seem to have killed – no I'm wrong, there were some geese. Plenty of shotguns pointing largely at vacant space. As noted, there's a lot of that… William Schaeuble has an en fleur muse, a tall, dark-haired woman haunts the budding grove[vi], dancing, sunbathing, eating dinners, watching the Schaeuble siblings engage in their stylised faux fights. In one painting, I think she's also up a tree (legs only visible). In Warren County Skyline, she's watching the house on fire through binoculars, at distance – those that inspire us shrink it. Here's an odd, seemingly disconnected memory bit, as mentioned at the start, in search of lost things (go Monsieur Proust…) In memory, it's oddly 1986, and I'm standing in front of a work at the Sydney Biennale (of that year – that in reality I never actually saw, wasn't there at the time, but recall it as if I was and did) by the well-liked, humourist, illustrator and too-occasional painter, Glen Baxter[vii]. The work was a keynote piece of the exhibition[viii], depicting a cowboy (ten-gallon hat, chaps,) aghast,… in front of a Modernist minimal canvas (blank possibly), of standard Rothko / Agnes Martin sort-of-proportion. The work carried the text "It was Tom's First Brush with Modernism", and somehow it sums up the disjunctive experience I'm having in William Schaeuble's Warren County world. If linguistically the term 'disjunctive' expresses a choice between two-or-more-mutually-exclusive-options, primarily linked by the word "or", then Schaeuble's art is a nicely[ix] precise visual equivalent of such an inclusive/exclusive narrative dialectic – nature/urban, big/small, mytho-poetic/geo-politic-polemic, that elevates his work from the quite well-written-about Chicago School lineage. The pastoral cannon of Bucolic[x] 'folk' influence, to present/timeless surrealism. Schaeuble, like his (to my mind) precursor, jazz age[xi] primitivist/surrealist, queen of Chicago bohemia, Gertrude Abercrombie, both being super-stylish in their mutual inventive (bebop) awkwardness', perhaps both as critical interpreters of then as now. And/or the other way around, temporality, it's elastic fantastic [xii]. It's an important key that unlocks… that Schaeuble's paintings are commonly quite large, the scale of the sort of modernist canvas that utterly shocks and befuddles 'Tom', and not that (smaller, votive-to-domestic) scale generally associated with American regional narrativism, such as Jessie Homer French, Grandma Moses, or the Mid-western introspection of Grant Wood. Consequently, there's a scale, force and ambition here in the otherwise reductive world of Warren County[xiii], where William Schaeuble sits unnaturally comfortable, for his years, astride timelessness and anti-temporality. Time is now, yet stopped dead in its tracks. Repeat… Time is now, yet stopped dead in its tracks. Repeat. There's another metaphor in time and space[xiv] from a different discipline that correlates to Schaeuble's reductive set of visual and narrative references, and contained colour palette, that oddly seems different and fresh each time. Namely that of the moody sixteen bar structure of Herbie Hancock's 1964 Cantaloupe Island. A seemingly simple premise of just three chords held over four bar periods; Fm7, Db7, Dm7 and back to Fm7 to complete the loop, over which subtle mood-swinging 'improvised' melody lines flow; mutating joy to sadness, celebration, disappointment, and back at the drop of a ten-gallon hat. The improvised melody, like Schaeuble's inventive re-working of known or predicted things, seems to make anything possible, the expected unexpected, all within a tight framework of disciplined modal transitions. Did I mention there were cakes? [i] Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove [À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur] (In Search of Lost Time) Vol.2. 1918. Still stuck on Remembrance of Things Past… [ii] Thank you Wikipedia [iii] Thank you, Wikipedia [iv] Roughly the size of Delhi, or Mexico's city limits, but slightly less populous. Thank you Britannica [v] c.f. the distant background of the eponymous exhibition painting. [vi] Like an Abercrombie maiden. [vii] Sadly, master surrealist of the Greetings Card, Glen Baxter passed away two months ago, 29th March 2026. R.I.P. I only saw a few paintings by Glen, exhibited once at the Nigel Greenwood Gallery (1990s). They exist strongly in my memory, and I would love to see them again in reality. I think they might be underrated. Glen Baxter was also an influential lecturer at Goldsmiths College, London during its golden era in 1980s, and arguably, quietly contributed much to the wit and idiosyncrasy of YBAism. [viii] 'Literally' the poster image for the exhibition, ORIGINS ORIGINALITY+BEYOND, 16 May – 6 July 1986, Art Gallery of New South Wales and Pier 2/3 Walsh Bay. Stephanie Rosenthal, Curator, Nick Waterlow, Artistic Director. [ix] Engineering sense. [x] This is absolutely one of my favourite etymologies, referring to idyllic countrysides, deriving from the Greek boukolikos, as in boukolika, being literally composed by rustic herdspersons (milkmaids or cowherds…) [xi] Gertrude Abercrombie, 1909-1977, Jazz-age, I mean as in free-form/Bebop; Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, etc,. Go compare those trees. [xii] c.f, Reverend and The Makers, Elastic Fantastic, 2006. Worth a listen. [xiii] There are no phones, power lines, data centres, social media, few if any palpable signs of contemporary life, even clothing seems to hover somewhere just outside the present, homely Fair Isle knits, old-school denims and overknee dresses. [xiv] It's not so entirely far-fetched that Gertrude Abercrombie and Herbie Hancock might have met or crossed paths, given Abercrombie's love of jazz and friendship with notable members of the Chicago scene at the time.