JULIAN SCHNABEL TREES OF HOME FOR PETER BEARD

Vito Schnabel Gallery in St Moritz presents Julian Schnabel: Trees of Home (For Peter Beard), featuring six new plate paintings.

With the Trees of Home (For Peter Beard), artist Schnabel celebrates the notion of an enriching dialogue – with a subject, a technique, a relationship – that endures and evolves over time. He has dedicated the exhibition to the memory of his lifelong friend, the late American photographer Peter Beard.

“The first time I met Peter was about 45 years ago, when I was a kid in New York City, with my best friend Bob Williamson, they were much older than me,” Schnabel recalls.

“In the summers in Montauk, at the end of Long Island, I watched Peter and Bob spending countless days carrying and cataloguing countless variations of rocks according to colour, size, shape and their aesthetic judgment, some looked like baked bread, some like salami. In truth I can’t look at the beach or the sea out here without seeing them. They have coloured my experience of this place. Peter and I were neighbours in Montauk. We lived less then 2 miles away from each other and we savoured those moments in the summer when we would have a tunafish sandwich with lots of mayo and drink Clamato and Vodka or just a glass of milk, at the table, in the garden behind his house, and talk. He loved to talk. And then after that he would come over to my outdoor studio and extrapolate on my works in progress. He had a lot of opinions and I loved him for every one of them, even if we didn’t agree most of the time!”

Schnabel’s new works speak to the genre of landscape painting, which the artist first explored in the early 1980s . The series on view in St. Moritz calls to mind The Walk Home, an expansive triptych of a forest that Schnabel completed in 1985, after seeing Van Gogh’s retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The exhibition will run through April 2021.

Image: Julian Schnabel, Trees of Home (for Peter Beard) 4, 2020, Oil, plates and bondo on wood, 72 x 60 x 12 inches (182.9 x 152.4 x 30.5 cm); © Julian Schnabel Studio; Photo by Tom Powel Imaging; Courtesy the artist and Vito Schnabel Gallery