julianschnabel.com
American, b. October 26, 1951, Brooklyn, New York

Julian Schnabel is an American painter and filmmaker. In the 1980s, Schnabel received international media attention for his plate paintings — large-scale paintings set on broken ceramic plates. Since the 1990’s, he has been a proponent of independent arthouse cinema. Schnabel directed Before Night Falls, which became Javier Bardem's breakthrough Academy Award-nominated role, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which was nominated for four Academy Awards. For the latter, he won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director and the Golden Globe Award for Best Director, as well as receiving nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director and the César Award for Best Director.

Schnabel returned to Houston in 1975 and rented a studio in the Heights neighborhood. After reported, repeated badgering by the artist, Jim Harithas, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, agreed to give him a show. The eponymously titled exhibit ran from February 20 to March 7, 1976 in the parallelogram building's lower gallery.

On seeing the show, ARTnews critic Charlotte Moser wrote, Though still formative, Schnabel’s paintings possess a palpable presence, but found the work clearly influenced by post-minimalist artists whose intellectual ideas he might share but whose technical expertise and clarity of vision he has yet to acquire.

It was with his first solo show, at the Mary Boone Gallery in 1979 that Schnabel had his breakthrough; all his works were sold in advance. He participated at the Venice Biennale in 1980 with Anselm Kiefer and George Baselitz. By the time he exhibited his work in a show jointly organized by Boone and Leo Castelli in 1981, he had become firmly established and was the youngest artist in the legendary exhibition A New Spirit in Painting in the Royal Academy of Arts. His now famous plate paintings — large-scale paintings set on broken ceramic plates — received a boisterous and critical reception from the art world. His wild and expressive works were classed as Neo-Expressionism by art critics. In the years to follow Schnabel's success on the art market would above all be criticized.

Schnabel's style is characterized by very large-scale paintings. He uses diverse materials such as plaster, wax, photographs, antlers, velvet and ceramics. His paintings make use of canvas, wood, muslin and even surfboards. His paintings often combine abstract and figurative elements. Due to the size, weight and depth of his works, they are often given sculptural properties.

In 2002, Schnabel painted the cover artwork for the Red Hot Chili Peppers' eighth studio album, By the Way. The woman featured on the cover of By the Way is Julian's daughter, Stella Schnabel, who was band member John Frusciante's then-girlfriend. Regarding the artwork, Frusciante noted: My girlfriend's father offered to do the album art, so we sent him rough mixes of eight songs, and he just got the vibe of the album from that. He said that he wouldn't be offended if we didn't like it, but we loved what he did. He's also given us great covers for all the singles. He's a true artist.

Schnabel had an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, which ran from September 1, 2010 to January 2, 2011 and occupied the entirety of the gallery's fifth floor. It examined the rich interplay between Schnabel's paintings and films. In 2011, Museo Correr exhibited Julian Schnabel: Permanently Becoming and the Architecture of Seeing, a selected survey show of Schnabel's career curated by Norman Rosenthal.

Art critic Robert Hughes was one of the most outspoken critics of his work; he once stated that Schnabel's work is to painting what Stallone's is to acting: a lurching display of oily pectorals. In the 2017 Swedish film The Square, set in a museum of modern art, Dominic West plays a character modeled on Schnabel.