JULIAN SCHNABEL. PAINTINGS 1978 – 2003
29. January - 25. April 2004

After the artist’s first sensational exhibitions in the USA and Europe presented in the 1980s, the works of young Julian Schnabel were hailed as a renaissance of painting – a genre which had been declared dead in the years before. All major collections have purchased his paintings incorporating broken plates and his expressive large-format oil works and collages. With his first film about his friend and painter colleague Jean-Michel Basquiat, Schnabel also made a name for himself as a director and scriptwriter in 1996. Though Schnabel had been celebrated as a superstar at the beginning of his career, critics contested the multitalented artist’s further development as a painter in the 1990s. Unjustly so, as the first retrospective presented in Germany since 1987 will evince. Comprising more than 50 large-format works and impressive sculptural groups, the exhibition presents a survey of Schnabel’s many-faceted oeuvre of the last twenty-five years and offers a chance to rediscover this outstanding contemporary painter.

Curator: Max Hollein, Schirn.