Julian Schnabel, Portrait of Italy Through Its Trees V, 2025. Oil, plates and bondo on aluminum, 108 × 84 inches. © Julian Schnabel / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Pace.
The old saw “you can’t see the forest for the trees” provides a useful way to understand Julian Schnabel’s superb seventeen-piece show now on view at Pace. Schnabel (b. 1951)—apparently suffering no fatigue after completing his fascinating film In the Hand of Dante (based on the novel by Nick Tosches)—has returned to one of his own sources: the plate paintings he began making in 1978 and showed as a retrospective last November at the Mnuchin Gallery. That show included one new work stashed on the gallery’s rarely visited top floor: a landscape which we can now see as a precursor to this exhibition. This new work destroys the traditional oppositions between painting and sculpture, figuration and abstraction. Anyone who assumes Schnabel’s focus on trees means he’s gone “back to nature” should think again.