FRITZ SCHOLDER (1937 - 2005)

Represented by iconic gallerist, Elaine Horwich, beginning in the late 1960s, Fritz Scholder rose to legendary status. Of Luiseño Mission Indian and European heritage, Scholder is considered the leader of the New American Indian Art Movement. His work holds echoes of Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism and Pop Art, among other influential modern art movements. Breaking with romantic clichés of Native genre imagery, Scholder's unique fusion style is always provocative.

Early in his career, Scholder received grants from the Rockefeller, Whitney and Ford Foundations. After five years in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he left his teaching position at the famed Institute of American Indian Arts to be a full-time artist. Scholder added printmaking in lithography, etching and monotypes to his oeuvre, often creating works in series.

Several books have been published on Fritz Scholder and the artist has been profiled in two documentaries for public television. In a single year, exhibitions of his work were seen in Japan, France, China, Germany and at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Fritz Scholder died in 2005 and since his death, interest in Scholder's art has continued to grow. In 2008, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian mounted a career retrospective of his work, with exhibitions in both New York City and Washington, D.C.

Fritz Scholder's painting, "Thoughts At Night, Monster Love", is a strong and visually sophisticated painting executed at a time when Scholder had emerged as a powerful influence on a new generation of savvy Indigenous American artists working in contemporary styles. Scholder loved to paint singular figures because he felt himself to be very much alone as a “rebellious” artist breaking into new aesthetic territory. In this glamorous image of convulsive beauty, we see Scholder walking the line between discipline and the unconscious, moving easily into the realm of expressionism where the artist celebrates and has a direct relationship with the sensuous process of getting paint onto canvas.

Fritz Scholder (1937-2005)