The Hall Art Foundation is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by American artist Julian Schnabel, to be held at Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg. Marking the museum’s 15-year anniversary, this show presents 8 monumental paintings first included in the Hall Art Foundation’s inaugural show at Schloss Derneburg in 2007, Julian Schnabel: Versions of Chuck and Other Works. A figurehead in the resurgence of painting in the late 1970s, Schnabel creates gestural and highly charged work that appropriate ancient and modern literary and cultural references and conflate the boundary between figuration and abstraction.

The subject of Schnabel’s series, Versions of Chuck, is a figure named Chuck – a surfer friend who helped to design and build Schnabel’s studio in Montauk, Long Island. Each of Schnabel’s paintings depicts Chuck in various poses, centrally and singularly positioned within the canvas. While Chuck’s body is rendered in brushy and abstracted red marks, his head and facial features are precisely drawn, topped with a crown of yellow, blond hair and surrounded by an orb of light blue. Disjointed from their bodies, the haloed heads resemble Christian icons, and Chuck takes on the appearance of an angel or saint. Schnabel, who began surfing as a teen in Texas, has described the act of surfing has the only physical activity that comes close to what it feels like to paint, and to surfers as witnesses of the sublime who actively pit themselves against nature’s force.

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