Julian Schnabel - Action Paintings 1985-2017

ARoS Aarhus Art Museum's major special exhibition in autumn 2018 features an exhibition with one of the great heavyweights of American art - the American painter and film director Julian Schnabel (b.1951).

The exhibition will be the largest ever presentation of the artist in the Nordic region and has been created in close collaboration with the artist himself. The exhibition will showcase over 40 large-scale works from the artist's career spanning more than 40 years.

Julian Schnabel is the most prominent figure in the return of figurative and narrative painting in the early 1980s after painting had been sidelined for a number of years in favour of the more idea-based and not least introverted art form of the 1970s.

Julian Schnabel began his artistic career in the United States, where, together with a significant group of artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, he wanted to bring subjective and narrative painting back to art. This had long been abandoned in favour of a distinctly minimalist and conceptual expression.

Schnabel became world-famous in the early 80s for his huge plate paintings, also known as plate-paintings, which are characterised by being painted on pieces of broken porcelain. Schnabel had been inspired to create these after visiting Gaudi's Parc Güell in Barcelona, known for its mosaic benches. Schnabel gained recognition and success with his use of unconventional and discordant materials, such as the smashed plates, and visitors to the exhibition will therefore encounter many different types of painting, ranging from painted plates, to old worn pressings, to canvas and photographic prints.

In a Danish context, the Danish counterpart to Schnabel, De Unge Vilde, has had a major impact on the shaping of Danish art from the 1980s to the present day. The Danish 80s artists are some of the most celebrated Danish artists and their reintroduction of narrative as the mainstay of painting resonates in Danish art to this day. Similarly, ARoS has for many years had an interest in the wild painting of the 1980s, which forms a significant part of the museum's permanent collection.

The neo-expressionism that Schnabel is an exponent of has formed a school for artists since then, and the legacy of Julian Schnabel can be seen among young contemporary artists in Danish and international painting today, making Julian Schnabel more relevant than ever before.

Schnabel's ability to constantly reactualise himself is also evident in his great success working in other media.

In 1996, Schnabel made the film Basquiat about his friend and fellow painter Jean-Michel Basquiat and in 2007 the critically acclaimed film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. In total he has directed six films, the most recent being At Eternity's Gate about the painter van Gogh. Willem Dafoe stars as Vincent van Gogh and won the Best Actor award at the Venice Film Festival. Schnabel's films are closely linked to his art, and his work with film can be seen as a natural extension of his painting.

ARoS visitors can look forward to an exhibition of world-class international painting and an exhibition of a true American icon.

The exhibition is curated and designed by Julian Schnabel and Louise Kugelberg on the initiative of Erlend G. Høyersten and Jens-Peter Brask.