An American artist and film maker has won Golden Globe, BAFTA, Cesar Award & Golden Plam. He is specially known for his plate painting – large-scale paintings set on broken ceramic plates.

Recently holding an exhibition at the Museo Correr, located on the Piazza San Marco in Venice, Italy. The show is produced and organised by Arthemisia Group in collaboration with Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia. Maybach is the event’s main sponsor, as well as BNL Gruppo BNP Paribas. 

American artist whose paintings have influenced and continue to change the landscape of what we call contemporary art. His work has given license to generations of new artists to expand art’s boundaries.

This retrospective illustrates his aesthetic, his connection to Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly, also drawing on the European and Mediterranean tradition. His art takes us backwards and forwards in history, recalling the style of the old Spanish and Italian painters like El Greco to Tintoretto, and speaks to ancient and modern literary and cultural references from Homer to William Gaddis – from Giotto Goya, from Antoni Gaudi to Pablo Picasso. 

Permanently Becoming includes early plate paintings as well as works that display the infinite variety of mediums and materials -velvet and oil cloth, pieces of wood, sails, photographs, rugs, tarpaulin, and in general any surface that can be painted on – and illustrates a way of using these materials that has taken them to a new artistic precipice, commandeering their prior meanings for a new set of meanings as painted reality.

In the late 70’s, the plate paintings, in their own way, reorganized the logic of painting and cultivated a new artistic terrain, serving as a cure to the so-called death of painting. 

Painter, sculptor and film director, Julian Schnabel stands out, first and foremost as a painter, but equally as a filmmaker, having directed Basquiat in 1996, Before Night Falls in 2000 (which won the grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival), the Diving Bell and The Butterfly in 2007 (which earned him the award for Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Globes) and Miral in 2010. Schnabel’s films are a natural continuation of his paintings, sharing the same visual sensibilities and warmth of surface. 

The exhibition opens with one of his sculptures: “Queequeg”, the most recent addition to a series of sculptures started in 1981 and were shown in 1982 in the mountains of Chantarella, in the Alps. “Queequeg” is the first result of a two-year partnership between Julian Schnabel and luxury automobile manufacturer Maybach. “Queequeg – The Maybach Sculpture” was first shown at Art Basel Miami Beach 2010. With this cooperation Maybach is further enhancing its involvement in the world of contemporary art supporting well-known artists and their engagement in mentoring young, art protégés as well as supporting art institutions such as the Louvre and the Fondation Beyeler. 

The sea is a recurrent theme in Schnabel’s paintings and films, and the vastness of this subject is what leads the artist to paint in such large formats, capable of engulfing the spectator in the visual experience, as happens with film. In his masterpiece “The sea”, created in Amagansett in 1981 using shards of broken Mexican vases, the sea is not represented as a natural element about to be heroically conquered by a surfer, but becomes evocative of time, history, and maybe the path towards the end. 

“Portrait of Father Pete Jacobs” of 1997, of Schnabel’s friend and “Portrait of Rula” that depicts his current partner and author of “Miral” subject of Schnabel’s most recent film. This will be exhibited in the neoclassical Dining Room of the Museo Correr. 

The earliest works in show, such as “Jack the Bellboy”, dating form the late 70’s, “Procession (for Jean Vigo)” and “Saint Sebastian” are early formulations of finding a surrogate for a figure in the physical body of a painting. They represent Schnabel’s reintroduction of the figurative element into a world of art completely dominated by reductive and formalist abstraction.Posted by : Amal Kiran Jana from Milan at 04:01 PM