Julian Schnabel
Bouquet of Mistakes
Pace Gallery, New York
September 15 – October 28, 2023
Glimpse, 2022
© Julian Schnabel, courtesy Pace Gallery
Pace presents Bouquet of Mistakes, an exhibition of new velvet paintings by Julian Schnabel, at its 540 West 25th Street flagship in New York. The works on display in Julian Schnabel’s show were made in concert with the preparation of his seventh feature film, In the Hand of Dante, an adaptation of Nick Tosches’s novel of the same name.
For the past 40 years, Julian Schnabel has been on a quest to express the inexpressible. He began painting on velvet in 1980, and, in 1984, his velvet paintings were the subject of his first exhibition with Pace Gallery on 57th Street. For Julian Schnabel, filmmaking and painting exist in a continuum in which subject matter crosses between mediums, assuming myriad forms. This relationship resonates throughout the exhibition, where indecipherable narratives emerge from a process of imagery central both to Schnabel’s film and to the paintings on view.
Celebrated for his vast and experimental practice that extends into the realms of sculpture and filmmaking, the artist has always been a painter first and foremost. Since 1978, when he created the first plate painting, The Patients and the Doctors—a work which abandoned traditional canvas in favor of a surface composed of broken plates—his use of unconventional, found materials has led to the invention of entirely new modes of painting. Dispensing with traditional distinctions between abstraction and figuration, Julian Schnabel’s plate paintings, and his works on velvet, reinvigorated interest in painting as a medium for contemporary art. Moreover, in the early years of his practice, Julian Schnabel decided to make paintings that incorporated the history and materiality of the medium itself, embracing a singular approach to both form and subject.
Julian Schnabel’s exhibition in New York marks his twenty-second solo presentation with Pace. With these new velvet paintings, Julian Schnabel considers the ways that the material appears as subject matter throughout the history of art—particularly in the works of Titian, Goya, and other Old Masters—and its symbolic weight in the history of humanity itself. But rather than creating illusionistic depictions of velvet, the artist uses the material for the surfaces of his works, inventing a new, contemporary kind of history painting in the process.
Among Julian Schnabel’s recent velvet works in the exhibition is the ten-panel Buñuel Awake (for Jean-Claude Carrière) or Bouquet of Mistakes (2022), a large-scale composition that evokes the grandeur of retablos, architecturally scaled paintings that loom behind the altars of Renaissance and Baroque churches across southern Europe. Also included in this body of new works is Gesù Deriso. Jesus Mocked (2023), which refers directly to an enigmatic Renaissance fresco by the Dominican monk Fra Angelico in the famous monastery of San Marco in Florence.
Concurrently with his exhibition at Pace in New York, Julian Schnabel is showing in the Amsterdam Sculpture Biennale ARTZUID through September 24.
PACE GALLERY
540 West 25th Street, New York, NY
