Julian Schnabel

Since 1977, Julian Schnabel has transformed what painting is, what a painting can be, and how paintings can be done. His works’ sheer physical presence; their novelties in material, surface, and form; and their poetic sentiments have captured people’s imagination as they negate the distinctions between abstraction and figuration. 

The exhibition Julian Schnabel will feature a new body of work created for the Legion of Honor’s outdoor Court of Honor. At twenty-four by twenty-four feet, these paintings are architectural and monumental in scale, yet part of an ephemeral natural cycle. Painted on found tarp-like material, they will be exposed to the elements over the four-month run of Julian Schnabel and will thus absorb their own exhibition history. They epitomize, in the artist’s words, “much of what are the essential characteristics of the smallest and most nascent proposals of how imagery, drawing, and material could be called a painting. . . as far as I can currently take painting; this week.”

In addition, the exhibition will present eight paintings, extraordinary in all aspects, from three distinct bodies of work.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.