Julian Schnabel
PRESS RELEASE
(St. Moritz, Switzerland)—Vito Schnabel Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Julian Schnabel, 6 Rose Paintings, which will remain on view through March 8, 2016. These six paintings consisting of broken plates and wood are covered with lush viridian, sap green, and black oil paint, pink rose madder, violet and white. There is no blue sky in these paintings. These roses grow in the cemetery near Van Gogh’s grave in Auvers-sur-Oise, France. They remain in an agitated state of destruction where broken shards of plates form nature’s un-composed, organic, and inevitable rhythm. Flowers float in a sea of green leaves, like islands seen from above. With more looking, the physical and the pictorial become indistinguishable from each other.
Schnabel’s work is marked by his ability to morph and change using an amalgam of materials, surfaces, and sources, always incorporating different ways of applying paint to a surface. “It was that radical moment that an artist waits for. I wanted to make something that was exploding as much as I wanted to make something that was cohesive.” - Referring to The Patients and the Doctors, the first plate painting, 1978.
Schnabel came across this unlikely material in 1978 in Park Güell in Barcelona while looking at Gaudí’s work and searching for a new way to paint. “My interest, unlike Gaudi’s, was not in the patterning or the design of the glazed tiles, it was in the reflective property of white plates to disturb the picture plane. The disparity between reflectiveness of the plates and the paint were in disagreement with each other and the concept of mosaic, because they fractured its homogeneity.” In these new rose paintings plates function in a very different way, submerged in paint they become the shadows of leaves and flowers and lose their identity as they assume a new identity as nature.
About Julian Schnabel:
Julian Schnabel was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1951. He received his BFA from the University of Houston in 1973. Following his graduation, he applied to the Whitney Independent Study Program; his application consisted of six slides sandwiched between two pieces of bread. He was accepted and graduated from the program in 1974. Schnabel’s first major solo exhibition was at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston in 1976, followed by a solo show at Mary Boone Gallery in 1979, in which Schnabel exhibited his plate paintings for the first time. Other solo exhibitions were presented at Kunsthalle Basel; Leo Castelli Gallery, New York; Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Pace Gallery, New York; Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, St. Moritz and Zurich; Maison Carrée, Nimes; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Gagosian Gallery, New York and Los Angeles; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Palazzo Venezia, Rome; Schloss Derneburg, Germany; Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada; Museo Correr, Italy; CFA Berlin; J.F. Willumsen Museum, Denmark; The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Connecticut; Dallas Contemporary; Dairy Art Centre, London; Museu de Arte de São Paulo; Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale; the University of Michigan Museum of Art; and Almine Rech Gallery, Paris. Schnabel’s work is included in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York and Bilbao; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, among many others. Schnabel lives and works in New York City and Montauk, Long Island.
About Vito Schnabel:
Vito Schnabel is an independent curator and contemporary art dealer based in New York. He produced his first exhibition in 2003 at the age of 16. Prior to opening the gallery in St. Moritz in 2015, Schnabel presented shows in varied locations such as Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich, Switzerland, Acquavella Galleries in New York, a cloistered garden in Venice during the Venice Biennale, photographer Richard Avedon’s former studio, and the Farley Post Office in New York, carefully matching artists’ work with unique and temporary exhibition settings. In February 2015, he curated an exhibition of Ron Gorchov’s paintings at Sotheby’s S|2 in London, and in May, he presented a group show at the historic Germania Bank Building on the Bowery, which had not been open to the public since the mid-1960s. The exhibition included works by Joe Bradley, Dan Colen, Jeff Elrod, Ron Gorchov, Mark Grotjahn, Harmony Korine, and Julian Schnabel. In addition to the St. Moritz gallery, Schnabel has an office and private exhibition space in New York City where he conducts his daily operations.
