Julian Schnabel
dal 16/4/2014 al 30/5/2014
Segnalato da
16/4/2014
Julian Schnabel
Gagosian Gallery, New York
View of Dawn in the Tropics: Paintings, 1989-1990. American artist approached painting as an act as susceptible to chance and circumstance as life itself.
A lot of what I do is about being in the moment...The residue of what happens; that's what's in the paintings.
—Julian Schnabel
Gagosian is pleased to present “View of Dawn in the Tropics: Paintings, 1989–1990,” an exhibition of paintings
by Julian Schnabel that are being shown in New York for the first time, twenty-five years after they were made.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Schnabel approached painting as an act as susceptible to chance and
circumstance as life itself. Working in the wake of American antecedents such as Robert Rauschenberg and Cy
Twombly—who brought a certain sense of freedom to bear on their evident romance with European art and
aesthetics—Schnabel made audaciously scaled paintings and sculptures whose richly hybrid sources were
expressed in an attitude of baroque excess combined with improvisational daring. Broken plates, Kabuki theater
backdrops, tarpaulins and boxing mats; thickly applied oil paint, collage, viscous resin, and flat digital
reproduction; fragments of text in different languages: these are just some of the diverse materials with which
Schnabel engages life's grand themes—sexuality, obsession, suffering, redemption, death, and belief.
For Paintings With and Without Bingo and Ozymandias, executed en plein air on the site of a ruined neoclassical
building during a sojourn in Florida, Schnabel used old tarpaulins, sailcloth, and rolls of velvet as grounds on
which to render reflections of his immediate surroundings subject to uncontrollable forces, from tropical storms
to his dog Bingo's seemingly random but deliberate paw prints. These paintings, and others made in similarly
unorthodox conditions in Montauk and San Sebastian, reveal an individualistic interplay between site and mark-
making, both intentional and incidental, that eschews pictorial hierarchies of authorship, subject, and style.
Schnabel’s persistent allegiance and magnanimous, catch-all approach to painting attests to the palimpsest of
emotion, memory, and chance that drives a gleaner's relationship to material and image: from collected words
and phrases to allusions to specific moments, places, friends, and family, and narratives of surface, materiality,
and studio process. These visceral paintings—where velvet is drenched in sea water, or tablecloths are doused
in paint and used as sponges on visibly patched tarpaulins—embody an alternative, iconoclastic approach to
“the sacred cloth,” shared with the aforementioned American forbears, as well as kindred spirits Francis Picabia,
Yves Klein, Alberto Burri, and Sigmar Polke, to name but a few. There is no substitute for the authenticity of
Schnabel's gesture; twenty-five years after their making, his elegant yet exuberant and intrepid paintings have
renewed vigor and urgency, anticipating the gestural, aleatory, and readymade painting so pervasive among
emerging artists today.
Julian Schnabel was born in New York City in 1951 and studied at the University of Houston (1969–73) and the
Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (1973–74). Public collections include Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Broad Art Foundation, Los
Angeles; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Tate Gallery, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. Recent solo exhibitions include Inverleith House, Edinburgh
(2003); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2004); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2004); Mostra
d'Oltramare, Naples (2005); Schloss Derneburg, Germany (2007); Tabacalera Donostia, San Sebastian, Spain
(2007); Beijing World Art Museum (2007); Saatchi Gallery, London (2008); Art Gallery of Ontario (2010); Museo
Correr, Venice (2011); Centro Italiano Arte Contemporanea, Foligno, Italy (2013); and Brant Foundation Art Study
Center (2013–14).
“Julian Schnabel: An Artist Has A Past (Puffy Clouds and Strong Cocktails),” an exhibition of fifteen paintings
produced over the past decade, will be on view at Dallas Contemporary from April 11–August 10, 2014.
Draw a Family, a fully illustrated book focusing on Schnabel's paintings of the past forty years, was published by
Karma in April of 2014.
Schnabel lives and works in New York City and Montauk.
Image: Untitled (detail), 1990, resin and gesso on burlap, 120 x 108 inches (304.8 x 274.3 cm)
For further information please contact the gallery at newyork@gagosian.com or at +1.212.741.1111. All images
are subject to copyright. Gallery approval must be granted prior to reproduction.
Press Enquiries
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Opening reception: Thursday, April 17th, from 6:00 to 8:00pm
Gagosian Gallery
522 West 21st Street - New York, NY 10011
Hours: Tue–Sat 10-6