Julian Schnabel

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Observers of contemporary art associate the name Julian Schnabel with highly evocative, large-scale paintings. At the time of his early exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe in the 80s, the larger-than-life Schnabel was loudly hailed as a new milestone in the development of painting, the savior of an art form declared dead years before. Still painting some of the most massive canvases around, Schnabel is a virtually unrivalled master in the use of "bigness" and a broad range of materials. Fragmentation and overlapping play an important role in his art, in terms of both material and content. If his paintings don't exhibit a consistent style, why should they? Instead, they combine oil painting and collage techniques, classical pictorial elements inspired by historical art, Neo-Expressionist features, as well as figuration and abstraction, gesture and structure. This volume presents a broad selection of Schnabel's paintings in a survey of his diverse oeuvre, with emphasis placed on works from 1990 to the present.