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Life on the Big Canvas
Meet the full range of Julian Schnabel’s work
Julian Schnabel makes art out of life, finding his materials in the fabric of the everyday. He uses broken plates as an improbable picture ground; he paints on velvet, market stall covers, army tarps, kabuki theater backdrops, and boxing ring floors, found surfaces that lend their own rich history to the artist’s exploration. A figurehead for the return of painting after his overnight success with a first New York solo show in 1979, he has since worked in a wide variety of media: making sculptures that transpose his pictorial forms into space as raw, seemingly time-worn artifacts; directing award-winning movies that paint portraits of artists and other subtly heroic figures; and even building his own dream of a Venetian palace in New York. “I want my life to be in my work, crushed into my painting like a pressed car. If it’s not, my work is just some stuff,” Schnabel has said, and this urgency permeates his oeuvre no matter what means or media the artist chooses.
Now available in a popular edition, the complete range of Schnabel’s work is portrayed in unprecedented depth in this TASCHEN monograph, made in dialog with the artist. The texts were contributed by friends and collaborators: Laurie Anderson draws an intimate portrait of Schnabel; in three essays by curators and art historians, Éric de Chassey discusses the paintings, Bonnie Clearwater the sculpture, and Max Hollein the site-specific work; Donatien Grau writes on the Palazzo Chupi, the artist’s extravagant home in New York’s West Village; while the novelist Daniel Kehlmann explores his cinematic oeuvre. This edition allows you to study the surfaces and artistic gestures and actions, offering the most generous opportunity to experience Schnabel’s art outside of meeting it in person.
Julian Schnabel (born 1959) is an American painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. After his breakthrough in 1979, he became one of the most successful painters worldwide, with solo shows at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Tate and Whitechapel, London; Centre Georges Pompidou and Musée d'Orsay, Paris; the Whitney, New York, and many others. Began directing with Basquiat in 1996, most recently the van Gogh film At Eternity’s Gate from 2018.
Hans Werner Holzwarth is a book designer and editor specializing in contemporary art and photography. His TASCHEN publications include the Collector’s Editions Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen, Beatriz Milhazes, Ai Weiwei, Georg Baselitz, Julian Schnabel, and the David Hockney SUMO A Bigger Book, as well as monographs such as the XXL-sized Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Louise Kugelberg is an interior designer born in Sweden, who has refurbished 18th-century buildings housing private art collections, worked collaboratively to design luxury boutique hotels, and constructed a massive portable pavilion tent out of recycled ocean plastic for Parley for the Oceans. Over the past five years, she has worked extensively with Julian Schnabel, designing exhibition spaces and catalogs as well as co-writing and editing the film At Eternity’s Gate. She lives and works in New York.
ISBN 978-3-8365-9630-5
Edition: Multilingual (English, French, German)