William Schaeuble Heartland

Morán Morán is thrilled to present Heartland, William Schaeuble’s debut Los Angeles solo exhibition. Rooted in the American Midwest, Heartland merges the surreal with the everyday in a new series of paintings created in the artist’s family garage amid the central Iowa landscape where Schaeuble lives and works. The exhibition takes its title from the term “heartland,” first coined by British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder to describe the fertile core of central Eurasia—believed, by him, to be the key to global dominance. From this concept, nationalist doctrines have drawn their own definitions of “heartlands,” imagined as cultural and political centers upon which identity and power converge. For the United States, the Midwest has long served as such a symbol, mythologized through Jeffersonian agrarian ideals and later reconfigured under the forces of industrialization and globalization. Within this fraught terrain, Schaeuble explores the tension between the political and the pastoral, reworking familiar Midwestern imagery into scenes that border on the surreal, uncovering the mythologies that shape how we understand this region.

Siblings wrestling, cakes sculpted into the likeness of dogs, agrarian fields, and voyeuristic figures populate Schaeuble’s canvases in narratives that remain ambiguous and unresolved. These bucolic tableaus—at once nostalgic and disquieting—echo the sincerity of Grandma Moses while evoking the sensual unease of Grant Wood. What first appears wholesome or sentimental gives way to something more complex: portraits of inherited trauma, surveillance, and control, rendered with both affection and critique.

Yet, as with his 19th-century predecessors, a sincere heart beats within Schaeuble’s Heartland. His paintings speak to enduring bonds of family, community, and care. Like the physical heartland that nourishes a nation, these works offer cultural sustenance—a space in which viewers can locate fragments of their own stories within the artist’s vision. Through Heartland, Schaeuble transforms the intimate and the ordinary into a meditation on memory, belonging, and the contradictions of the American experience.

William Schaeuble (b. 1999, Des Moines, IA) is an American painter whose work focuses on telling stories of his personal life in connection to the broader world of contemporary culture, art history and the great outdoors. Schaeuble grew up in Iowa and graduated from The School Of The Art Institute of Chicago in 2022.