NEW YORK, NY.- Anna Zorina Gallery announces William Schaeuble’s solo exhibition, Town & Country. Schaeuble’s paintings exist between sincerity and satire, nostalgia and absurdity. Rooted in the landscapes and rhythms of Midwestern life, his work is semi-autobiographical and surreal, blending personal memories with exaggerated fiction. Set in the artist’s small hometown outside of Des Moines, Iowa, the scenes in this latest series capture a world that feels at once innately familiar and quietly strange. Between the urban skyline and expansive cornfields, domestic life unfolds with chaos and humor.

Beneath the playful surfaces of Schaeuble’s paintings, lies an introspective investigation into masculinity, relationships, and identity. Populated by his family, animals, neighbors, and objects from his life, these characters operate in loosely constructed realities where meaning is flexible. Through spare compositions and deliberate oddities, Schaeuble invites us to witness a world where the absurd and the heartfelt, the tragic and the comic, are all part of the same rural pageant. These paintings tell stories while exploring the spaces between town and country, memory and myth, the universal and the deeply personal.

Drawing inspiration from American Regionalism and particularly the work of fellow Iowan Grant Wood, Schaeuble references folk aesthetics and symbolism with a contemporary twist. Like Wood, he embraces storytelling, using plant life, domestic architecture, and natural forms as stand-ins for resilience and continuity. One of the hallmarks of Schaeuble’s style is the way he plays with visual and emotional contrast. His paintings often depict still, symmetrical environments interrupted by strange human or animal behavior, a man and dog peer through a window together; geese huddle as humans wade nearby; trees and humans mirror each other’s limbs. These moments create a subtle tension, suggesting that beneath the veneer of seemingly mundane life lies a deeper, often ambiguous emotional world. Schaeuble’s work presents contradictions that find beauty in banality, humor in hardship, and authenticity in the surreal. His is a vision of the Midwest that embraces both its charm and its complexity - where stories are only half true, and that’s more than enough.

William Schaeuble (b. 1999, Iowa) lives and works in Iowa. He earned a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022. Town & Country is Schaeuble’s New York solo debut exhibition. He shows with Povos Gallery in Chicago and recently completed a residency at The Fores Project in London. His work has been reviewed in Artforum and New City Art as well as featured in The Wall Street Journal, Hyperallergic, and The Observer.