Julian Schnabel’s style of painting has polarized viewers and critics for decades but even today he’s still one of our most famous painters. But his paintings have seemingly taken a back seat to being a film director, lover, father, builder and interior decorator. His films Basquiat, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, for which he won the Palme D’Or and Before Night Falls were popular successes as well as being critically acclaimed. As you can see from the video, he uses anything at his disposal to create a “moment” with his work.
From the Gagosian press release:
“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.”
Porfirio Munoz’s documentary In The Course of Seven Days is timely: currently showing at the — his first US museum show since the 1980s — and with two solo exhibitions, the Brooklyn-born painter might just be back in vogue – not that he cares. See the video on Nowness by clicking here. “This show is a capsule of what happened, a selection of paintings from the past 10 years, more or less,” says Schnabel of Every Angel Has a Dark Side, which opens at the Dairy Art Centre in London on 25 April. “It’s a continuum of ways that I have made marks, used materials and created images.”
Every Angel Has a Dark Side runs at The Dairy Art Centre from April 25 through July 27 2014. View of Dawn in the Tropics: Paintings, 1989-1990 opens at the Gagosian Gallery, New York (24th Street) on April 17 through May 31. Julian Schnabel: An Artist Has A Past (Puffy Clouds and Strong Cocktails) is at the Dallas Contemporary through August 10. Draw a Family, a book of Schnabel’s paintings of the past forty years, was just published by Karma.
Untitled (Milton Puffy Clouds Strong Cocktails), 2005