Julian Schnabel Overview

Julian Schnabel is an American artist and filmmaker. He has been acclaimed at Cannes and has won a Golden Globe, as well as BAFTA, César Award, Golden Palm and two nominations for the Golden Lion and an Academy Award nomination. He... [more]

Julian Schnabel is an American artist and filmmaker. He has been acclaimed at Cannes and has won a Golden Globe, as well as BAFTA, César Award, Golden Palm and two nominations for the Golden Lion and an Academy Award nomination. He has directed four films which were widely acclaimed, including Before Night Falls, which became Javier Bardem's breakthrough Academy Award nominated role, and the four-time Academy Award nominated The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. He is the interior decorator of the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York City. It was with his first solo show, at the Mary Boone Gallery in 1979, however, that Schnabel would truly come to be regarded as a major new force in the art world. He participated at the Venice Biennale in 1980, and by the mid-1980s had become a major figure in the Neo-expressionism movement. By the time he exhibited his work in a show jointly organized by Boone and Leo Castelli in 1981, he had become firmly established. His now famous "plate paintings"—large-scale paintings set on broken ceramic plates—received a boisterous and critical reception from the art world. A reputation for making brash pronouncements about his importance to the art world ( "I'm the closest thing to Picasso that you'll see in this *#@ life") engendered contempt from both colleagues and the viewing public. Schnabel's signature works contain an underlying edge of brutality, while remained suffused with compositional energy. Schnabel claims that he's "aiming at an emotional state, a state that people can literally walk into and be engulfed." Schnabel insists he is a painter first and foremost, though he is better known for his films. “Painting is like breathing to me. It’s what I do all the time. Every day I make art, whether it is painting, writing or making a movie.” [show less]