Julian Schnabel

Julian Schnabel was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1951. His first solo show was at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, in 1975. Since then, his work has been at exhibited at renowned institutions worldwide including the Tate Gallery, London (1983), the Whitney Museum of American Art (1987), Inverleith House (2003); Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (both 2004); Mostra d'Oltramare, Naples (2005); Schloss Derneburg, Germany, Tabacalera Donostia, San Sebastian, and The Beijing World Art Museum, China (all 2007) and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2010). His most recent exhibition, "Julian Schnabel: Permanently Becoming and The Architecture of Seeing," opened in June 2011 at the Museo Correr, Venice. His work is included in major international museums and private collections, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art; the Guggenheim Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles; Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Schnabel’s mythic, often controversial career is rooted in his ability to morph and change using a vast alchemy of sources and materials composed and distributed across surface and support in defiance of the very notions of moderation, rationality, and order. His baroque attitude is embodied in audaciously scaled paintings that, over the course of time, have combined oil painting and collage techniques; classical pictorial elements inspired by historical art and neo-expressionist features; abstraction and figuration. Tackling appropriately expansive themes such as sexuality, obsession, suffering, redemption, death, and belief, he has employed a diversity of found materials including broken plates, diverse textiles such as Kabuki theater backdrops, tarpaulins, and velvet; a plethora of images, names, and fragments of language; as well as thickly applied paint, viscous resin, and digital reproduction. Schnabel lives and works in New York City and Montauk, Long Island.