The Rotonda della Besana in Milan hosted an exhibition dedicated to Julian Schnabel, one of the greatest contemporary art voices, an artist who can interpret the anxieties, but above all the joys that life brings to all of us. The exhibition is intentionally void of setup and lighting ad hoc and looks just like the artist's study.

The exhibition features approximately thirty works along a path, which stretches through the rooms of the hosting facility. The itinerary focuses on four essential themes of Schnabel's pictorial body of work: from the large pieces, the huge canvases where thick and intense strokes are mixed with more blurred, thinner strokes, to the portraits and self-portraits gallery. Then, moving on, from the Plate Paintings, painted on the surface of ceramic fragments, to the Japanese Paintings, oil colours on digital pictures.

The wonderful series dedicated to Jane Birkin, the British-French singer, created in 1990, in the exposition is represented by three pieces that have the essentialness and the dimensions of the boats. Furthermore, in these pieces, the artist used as support the same material of the sails of the boats. Anno Domini 1990 is also the date of the creation of the three spectacular pieces –over 6 meters in height and width- that open the exhibition. The work is done on tarpaulin (or tarp), large, pliable, water-repellent sheets, an unusual material, different from what the artist had been using since he started painting in the ‘70s.

A flow of wax and resin, which gives the canvas the semi-liquid, luminous shine of a wax-based varnish, characterizes the portrait gallery. The portraits are done on quadrangular canvases embellished by white frames in glass fibre, a material that has allowed the artist to reproduce the carving of a Spanish baroque frame very dear to him. To declare his deep passion for the land, art and history of Spain, there are three self-portraits, where Schnabel, "proud, bordering presumption", paraphrasing the Pictor optimus Giorgio de Chirico, immortalizes himself à la façon de Vélasquez.

A space of the exhibition is dedicated to theworks done on fragments of ceramic plates. On these fragments, human figures depicted in a three-quarter profile emerge from solitary trellises while a face, almost a dumfounded sacred Fayoum portrait, looks at the scene.
The series of the Japanese Paintings has an alluring quality that derives from his fluid, symbolical ability to fluctuate between the abstract and the figurative.
The exhibition concludes with two works, Buckwheat Pillow and Lucio, which in some way summarize the whole Julian Schnabel's production, characterized as they are by the disorderly, dynamical and impulsive component of the abstract painting which goes hand in hand with a strong, symbolic matrix.


Julian Schnabel (b. 26 October 1951) is an American artist and filmmaker born in Brooklyn, New York City.

Life and art. Schnabel moved with his family to Brownsville, Texas, when still very young and it was there that he spent most of his formative years. He received his B.F. in New York City, which included slides of his work sandwiched between two pieces of bread. (He was accepted.) Struggling in the art world, Schnabel worked as a short-order cook and hung out at Max's Kansas City, the restaurant-nightclub in Greenwich Village, while he worked on his art. In 1975, Schnabel had his first solo show at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. Over the next few years he traveled frequently to Europe, where he was enormously impressed by the work of Antoni Gaudi, Cy Twombly and Joseph Beuys.
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 brought on a boisterous and critical response from the art world. But what was beyond doubt was the vibrancy that Schnabel brought to the art scene. Using Kabuki theatrical sets, velvet and animal hides, his bold, somewhat confrontational style recalled the energy and daring of Picasso and Pollock.
Schnabel's signature works, filled with raw emotion, contain an underlying edge of brutality while still being suffused with energy. Schnabel claims that he's “aiming at an emotional state, a state that people can literally walk into and be engulfed”.
Julian Schnabel lives in New York, maintaining studios in New York City and in Montauk on the eastern end of Long Island. His works are in the collections of various museums throughout the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art; The Whitney Museum of American Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; Reina Sofia and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, etc.

Film. He has written and directed three films: Basquiat, a biopic on the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat (1996), and Before Night Falls, an adaptation of Reinaldo Arenas' autobiographical novel (2000), which he also produced. Before Night Falls was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor (Javier Bardem).
In 2007 he directed The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, an adaptation of a French memoir (by Jean-Dominique Bauby). He won the award for best director at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. He is nominated for an Independent Spirit Award in the category of best director for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Writing. Schnabel published his autobiography CVJ: Nicknames of Maitre D's & Other Excerpts From Life, in 1987.

Recording Artist. Schnabel released the album "Every Silverlining Has a Cloud" on Island Records [Catalog #314-524 111-2] in 1995. Recorded in Brooklyn, NY in 1993, the album features guest musicians including Bill Laswell, Bernie Worrell, Buckethead, and Nicky Skopelitis.

Filmography. Basquiat (1996) - Before Night Falls (2000) - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)