A New Julian Schnabel Show Surfaces Works From His Personal Collection

The exhibition “Julian Schnabel: Selected Works From Home” has just opened in a newly inaugurated gallery at Guild Hall in New York, featuring paintings and sculptures the artist and filmmaker liked so much he decided to keep them for himself. 

Schnabel has been a leading figure in the contemporary art world since his first solo show at the Mary Boone Gallery in 1979. Born in Brooklyn, he studied at the University of Houston before applying for an independent study program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he famously enclosed his undergraduate portfolio between slices of bread.

Where leading artists of the time valued ideas over objects, meaning over medium, Schnabel’s success compelled critics to reconsider the importance of process and materials. Across more than four decades, Schnabel’s monumental multimedia works have borne out this inquiry as they’ve swerved from rich to stark expressionism.

Where his signature “plate paintings” of the 1980s were vibrant compositions made up of ceramic shards, his velvet and tarp-based works have favored austere abstraction and textual references. His sculptures likewise bear out a spare symbolism.

The show traces Schnabel’s career through works that he’s opted to keep and live among. The collection encompasses all periods of Schnabel’s long career—from Procession (for Jean Vigo), a wax painting from 1979, to , an abstract stainless-steel sculpture from 2020, displayed in Guild Hall’s Furman Garden. His proclivity for mixed media runs throughout, borne out in early works such as (1978) and continuing with his 2006 series of works on maps.

A group of Schnabel’s recent plate paintings is featured as well, including a portrait of his wife Louise Kugelberg and of painters Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. Schnabel—who directed 2018’s , a retelling of the final days of Van Gogh—also painted a rose bush close to the Dutch painter’s grave; that canvas is on view.

The exhibition marks Schnabel’s return to the East Hampton institution, following his 1998 solo show.

“As someone with a long history of living and working in Montauk and being part of its community, we are thrilled that Julian returns to Guild Hall with this intimate installation of an extraordinary and historical body of work,” said Melanie Crader, the museum’s director of visual arts who organized the show.

“We are pleased to also celebrate him at our summer gala, especially at the final phase of our campus-wide renovation and the same year he releases his newest feature film.” The film in question is In the Hands of Dante, about an academic discovering an original manuscript of the Italian poet’s magnum opus, The Divine Comedy.