JULIAN SCHNABEL -THE BRANT
The Legendary Shattering Plate Portraits
Anyone searching for an exceptionally unique and captivating art exhibition will find just that at the upcoming Julian Schnabel exhibit titled Self Portraits of Others, opening September 9, 2021, at the Brant Foundation in New York. It features twenty-five plate paintings created between 2018 and 2020, exploring the theme of portraiture throughout art history and developing the artist and film director’s practice while making a film about Vincent Van Gogh’s life.
Julian Schnabel is an American painter and filmmaker born in New York in 1951 and raised in Brownsville, Texas. After receiving his B.F.A. at the University of Houston, he went on to study at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. Schnabel is well known for his cutting-edge approach to art and filmmaking, especially his large-scale paintings. Due to his use of materials and surfaces not commonly associated with art and his presence in numerous areas of popular culture today, he has become significantly influential in the contemporary art world. He had his breakthrough with his first solo show at the Mary Boone Gallery in 1979, and he then participated in the Venice Biennale in 1980. During the ’80s, he received international attention for his large-scale “plate paintings,” created with broken ceramic plates. In 2002 he even made the cover artwork for the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ album By The Way. Art critic Robert Hughes once commented, “Schnabel’s work is to painting what Stallone’s is to acting: a lurching display of oily pectorals.”
As for his film career, Julian Schnabel had directed well-known films such as Before Night Falls (one of Javier Bardem’s first roles which earned him an Academy Award nomination) and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a film that received four Academy Award nominations and earned Schnabel the Golden Globe Award for Best Director. Schnabel’s first movie was a biopic on fellow artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. In 2018 he released the film about Vincent Van Gogh titled At Eternity’s Gate, which starred Willem Dafoe as the painter. Self Portraits of Others reflects his artistic evolution during the making of this film. He has stated that “whenever asked do my films influence my paintings, I’ve always replied no, my paintings have always influenced my films until I made At Eternity’s Gate about Vincent van Gogh. The film demanded that I paint van Gogh paintings as props and that I paint a likeness of Willem Dafoe as Vincent since he was inhabiting Vincent in the film and the paintings needed to look like the actor.” He saw that Van Gogh would make different models of his paintings, so he decided to turn the props he made for the film into paintings. He then produced different versions of the same images of characters in the movie. He also created three paintings of Frida Kahlo, three self-portraits of Caravaggio, and three portraits of his son Cy as Velasquez and as the dead Christ from Titian’s last painting at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. He created a total of 25 self-portraits of others.
This is the third Schnabel exhibition at The Brant Foundation’s New York location.
