This winter, Vito Schnabel Gallery is presenting an exhibition focused on three New York artists who made important contributions to contemporary painting. Francesco Clemente, David Salle, and Julian Schnabel worked in different eras, but their work shared a common goal: to create beautiful and innovative paintings.
Francesco Clemente, David Salle, and Julian Schnabel are three artists who came to prominence in the early 1980s. They were all part of a new generation of painters who were identified as Neo-Expressionists. They shared a common interest in using figural representation in their work, which was a radical change for the city’s art scene and for a traditional medium like painting.
In the 1980s, New York City was emerging from a state of financial and political ruin. However, this young generation of artists were coming to the city to create their own cultural traditions. Among these artists was Francesco Clemente, who had moved to New York in 1980. His work was featured at the Venice Biennale in Italy, and he became well known among the international art community. Meanwhile, David Salle and Julian Schnabel had both come to New York in the early to mid-1970s. Salle had recently completed his MFA at California Institute of the Arts and studied under John Baldassari, while Schnabel established himself in New York during the earlier part of the decade.
A lot of new, modern art suddenly came about a few years ago. Some very famous artists, like Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Frida Kahlo, were part of this new movement, and they showed their work in solo exhibitions that attracted a lot of attention. Eventually, they all got together and showed their work at the Mary Boone Gallery. It’s been a while since there’s been this much interest in young artists’ work, and they’ve been exhibiting nearly every year. Plus, they’ve been able to get critical acclaim and make a lot of money from their art.
The return of figurative painting by artists like Clemente, Schnabel, and Salle sparked a new interest in image-making and narrative. This type of painting is characterized by a sensual and expressive form of drawing and painting on the surface of the canvas. This exhibition celebrates the work of these artists over the past four decades and highlights their different techniques and approaches over time.
The exhibition will be on view at Vito Schnabel Gallery, St. Moritz through January 21, 2023.
Francesco Clemente is a painter who is interested in traditional and symbolic languages. He started painting in the 1980s and has been working on an approach to image-making inspired by allegory, symbolism, and myth. His work explores the body as a boundary between inner and outer self. Francesco Clemente also draws on his fascination with Islamic mysticism through the writings of Henry Corbin and his personal experiences with Sufi teachings and music.
In Wings of Desire, which is on display in the exhibition, Clemente uses angels to represent sensual and erotic images. He uses this imagery to refer to Shiite cosmology, William Blake, and the Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. His paintings are concise and contemporary, and they express his quest to ponder the arcane and fully understand life. The paintings in Wings of Desire act as talismans, meant to offer the viewer a sense of calm and invite them to fly.
David Salle is a painter who uses complex visual syntax and a sophisticated pictorial structure to create dynamic compositions that appropriate and reconstitute images in unlikely juxtapositions. His paintings celebrate the complexity of painting’s plasticity and the way in which each part relates to the whole. Salle incorporates the language of film and cinematic techniques to create a pictorial space that is deliberately fragmented, playing with allusion and depth to create scenes layered within and behind one another, injecting humor, drama, and buoyancy. Over the course of the past four decades, his practice has consistently probed the ways by which images are recognized and perceived. Salle is a willful conductor of composition, insisting that we participate in the construction of narrative and meaning.
Old Friends is a selection of paintings from 2018- 2020, in which Salle uses black and white illustrations of familiar characters from advertising or the mass media to contrast brightly-colored images from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. He uses these forms as the backdrop for his paintings, using the effects of mood to draw the viewer’s attention to the image on the canvas.
This show will have paintings of different kinds, all of which are made with materials like paint and cloth. Julian Schnabel will be showing a few new paintings and one from a few years ago. One of the paintings is of a man named Caravaggio, who was a famous painter. Schnabel painted this painting of Caravaggio himself, which is really cool. In it, Caravaggio is posing with his head cut off, and David is holding it. Schnabel has also painted two other paintings of Caravaggio, one where Oscar Isaac (an actor) is posing and one where Caravaggio is actually painted from life. The third painting is a self-portrait of Caravaggio as Goliath, which is even cooler.
Schnabel’s new paintings, on plates and velvet, show the evolution of his visual language and how the relationship between figuration and abstraction manifests itself. Velvet is a fabric that has a weight and history of its own, and it’s easy for Schnabel’s brush to create resistance against its pristine color. He uses modeling paste on velvet, and then layers spray paint and oil over it. He also attaches cotton balls to the paintings to create textures and fractures in the colors.