Julian Schnabel in Conversation with Max Hollein

Longtime collaborators, Schnabel and Hollein will discuss the genesis of Julian Schnabel: Symbols of Actual Life and the potential of painting today against the backdrop of the French neoclassical architecture of the Legion of Honor. Since 1978, Julian Schnabel has transformed what painting is, what a painting can be, and how paintings can be done. He captures people’s imagination with paintings that speak to his incessant appetite for sculptural physicality, material diversity, and pictorial symbolism. His large-scale works often oscillate between abstraction and figuration, leaving the viewer agape. Schnabel’s first major museum exhibition on the West Coast in 30 years will feature a new body of work created for the Legion’s Court of Honor. At twenty–four by twenty–four feet, the paintings are both monumental in scale and ephemeral in nature. Exposed to the elements over the four-month run of the exhibition, they aren’t meant to last and as such, “epitomize 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 said by Schnabel. In addition, three distinct bodies of work including a new series of abstractions on Mexican sack linen, as well as examples from the Goat Paintings (begun in 2012) and the Jane Birkin series (1990) will be on view.