On the occasion of this year’s Berlin Art Week, Circle Culture is
delighted to present graphic works by American artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel. The two-part exhibition will be on display at Circle
Culture and Hotel de Rome, and will be opening on two evenings. This
first exhibition of the gallery with Julian Schnabel also marks the
return of Circle Culture to its place of origin in Berlin-Mitte. This
place will be revitalized as a main location for exhibitions, round
tables and cultural projects in a wide spectrum.
Put your hands over the piano keys. Press at least 3 or 4 down at once.
The images in these editions of prints are of a process Julian Schnabel
has developed and expanded on for years. They are records of his actions
each made whole by degrees of dissonance and harmony – notes in a
chord.
Water falls not down but according to the play of light
and the light and dark parts within us where we harbor hopes of
immersion and a release back into the glinting sun.
Superimposition
creates simultaneity: everything happening at once. The water before,
the water now, the water after. The tree that came over the falls,
branches nearly shorn. What happened? What else happened? What happened
in me? Another tree pole-axed by the drop on the rocks flew back up in
front of the one still falling. A cart and the refuse in it came over
the edge and plummeted, a torn sheet billowing out and floating down. But
you couldn’t really see it all for the leaves in your face.
Selections
from a satchel of memories and fantasies superimpose themselves upon
the sights and sounds of the present. Eyes shut or open we are expert in
selecting where our focus falls. Where our eye falls may not be where
our heart falls for our being has many paths. We see simultaneously,
chronologically, narratively, mystically.
Take apart a drawing.
An impulse broken only by the most complete drawings. But a similar act:
creating a narrative from a set of abstract shapes is an invitation to a
secret picture of our own. In this form, in the scale of the page,
Julian has worked out feelings – intimate and concise. Like the page,
like poems or letters do, these prints offer vibrant reflection.
An
adult learns that the unconscious is filled and fixed by images and
experiences of childhood. What a child experiences is the printing of
their unconscious with images and events. Julian Schnabel’s prints are a
palimpsest of things that occurred before he arrived; as if he became
one of the children who was looking out the school bus window with
children he never met: Rorschach trees and clouds, purple explosions of
excitement and doubt, and filtered light peering from behind a cloud.
We’re learning what life is, images become physical facts as we are
learning to grasp the concepts of death and time, who and where we are.
We even see places we might have heard of but will never go to.
The
images create an unlimited, incomprehensible world and the wonder and
fear a child feels trying to grasp it: a goat with a teddy bear crown;
an army of uniformed men in a purple storm and most terrifying the
distance our goat mother/father appears to be from us, the viewers. Hard
to put together in life, unnameable marks reacting to the unsuspecting
hosts, discarded visual aids no longer in use, we wake from the dream,
confused, thrilled, and frightened by the huge world within our heads
and a brand new day.
– Brian Kelly (2017)
Julian Schnabel
(*1951 in New York City) has exhibited widely in museums and galleries
internationally, including Kunsthalle Basel; Mary Boone Gallery, New
York; Leo Castelli Gallery, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam;
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The
Pace Gallery, New York; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Gagosian Gallery,
New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museu de
Arte de Sao Paolo. His work is part of important collections all over
the world, including Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York und Bilbao; Centre
Georges Pompidou, Paris.
