Hans Werner Holzwarth - Julian Schnabel - 2022

About the editors at Taschen /

Hans Werner Holzwarth designs and edits books on contemporary art and photography. He has notably published with TASCHEN Collector's Editions for Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen, Beatriz Milhazes, Ai Weiwei, Georg Baselitz and Julian Schnabel, as well as David Hockney's SUMO A Bigger Book and monographs such as the XXL Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Louise Kugelberg is an interior architect born in Sweden who renovated 18th-century buildings housing private art collections, collaborated on the decoration of luxury boutique hotels, and designed a huge mobile pavilion by recycling plastic recovered from the ocean for Parley for the Oceans. In the last five years, she has collaborated extensively with Julian Schnabel, notably designing exhibition spaces and catalogs for him, but also co-writing and editing the film At Eternity’s Gate. She lives and works in New York.



About the work 'SCHNABEL' published by TASCHEN /

NEW WORK - NOT BOUND OR LEAFED THROUGH, IN ITS ORIGINAL CASE WITH A REINFORCED BOX FOR LAND TRANSPORT - EDITION NUMBER OF THE WORK: No. 0546 - Ordered on December 30, 2022 under slip/packing list No. 10191634 and purchased that same day by me at the Taschen Store Gallery - Brussels, Place du Grand Sablon, 35 - 1000 Brussels - Belgium.
Limited collector's edition of 1,000 numbered copies, signed by Julian Schnabel.
Luxury boxed edition, 33 x 44 cm, 7.83 kg, 570 pages
ISBN 978-3-8365-8161-5
Edition: Multilingual (German, English, French)


Life on a Vast Canvas / The Art of Julian Schnabel

“I want my life to be in my work, crushed into painting like a car crushed in a wreck. Otherwise, my works would be just stuff.” Julian Schnabel spoke these words in 1979, the eve of his sudden rise to fame in New York. Since that day, he has embodied the return of painting to the era, with a renewed relevance. That of his painted plates, where shards of dishes and other everyday fragments become an unlikely support and his preferred material. He paints on velvet, market or army tarps, Kabuki theater backdrops or boxing ring mats, often discovered during his travels or in the outdoor environments where he works, which lend their history to his pictorial exploration. Place is important to Schnabel; the place where he creates his works and the place where he installs them. Specific places that add their rich history to the strata of meaning of the work. His art makes no distinction between abstract and figurative, but figurative forms sometimes come alive with a life of their own, in sculptures that transpose his painting into space, raw and as if worn by time. Schnabel has also made a name for himself as a filmmaker. He has so far signed six films. In 1996, Basquiat told from within the New York art scene of the late 1970s and 1980s and sketched the intimate portrait of the eponymous artist. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which traces the fate of a man afflicted with the syndrome of confinement, determined to not give up, earned him two Golden Globes in 2007, and his portrait of Van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate (2018) is a homage to the creative spirit.

The full scope of Schnabel's work is expressed today with unprecedented depth in this limited-edition volume, produced in close collaboration with the artist, who selected the works and designed the cover. The texts were written by friends and collaborators: Laurie Anderson offers an intimate portrait of him, and three essays focus on his place in art history: Éric de Chassey discusses his paintings, Bonnie Clearwater his sculptures, and Max Hollein his installations. Donatien Grau, for his part, examines Palazzo Chupi, the Venetian palace the artist dreamed of in New York's West Village, while novelist Daniel Kehlmann focuses on his cinematic oeuvre. This large-format edition, highly timely, allows a close study of the surfaces and the myriad pictorial incidents of his works, unless you are lucky enough to see them in person.