Old Friends: Francesco Clemente, David Salle, Julian Schnabel – Vito Schnabel Gallery (Switzerland)
This winter the Vito Schnabel Gallery presents itself Old Friends: Francesco Clemente, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, one exhibition focused on three epoch-defining New York artists whose work broke new ground in contemporary painting.
Francesco Clemente, David Salle, and Julian Schnabel each emerged on the New York art scene in the early 1980s. As contemporaries and close friends, they were collectively identified as part of the Neo-Expressionist group, a new generation of young painters. Though stylistically distinct, they were united by a common interest: a renewed approach to figural representation that radicalized both the celebrated inner-city art scene and a traditional medium previously declared “dead”.
1980s New York evolved from a state of near bankruptcy and political ruin to a place vibrant with a vibrant cultural zeitgeist, brimming with new artistic freedoms and creative possibilities. As tensions of the Cold War, rising crime rates, the crack epidemic, a widening wealth gap, the AIDS epidemic and political upheaval grew, a young generation of artists came to the city. Italian-born Francesco Clemente moved permanently to Manhattan in 1980 and opened his studio on the almost-forgotten streets of NoHo. His rise to prominence as part of Italy’s Transavanguardia movement attracted international attention at the 39th Venice Biennale. Meanwhile, Americans David Salle and Julian Schnabel had both arrived in New York in the early to mid-1970s. Salle had recently completed his MFA at the California Institute of the Arts with John Baldassari, while Schnabel settled in New York earlier in the decade and continued his studies at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Almost overnight, the art scene erupted in a boom. And at the forefront of Neo-Expressionism, Schnabel, Salle, and Clemente led the way, presenting their work in a series of one-man shows that attracted widespread attention, and they finally came together at the Mary Boone gallery. Never before had a group of young artists exhibited so quickly, or attracted the attention of critics, curators and the art market with such intensity, presenting themselves in one or two exhibitions a year; back-to-back shows almost every year; or several gallery exhibitions at the same time. The return to figuration spearheaded by Clemente, Schnabel, and Salle catalyzed a profound new interest in pictorial composition and storytelling, characterized by a sensual and viscerally expressive form of marking and pictorial innovation on the surface of the canvas. Old friends at the Vito Schnabel Gallery celebrates the three artists’ contributions to the development of contemporary painting and sheds light on the evolution of their respective practices over the past four decades.
The exhibition starts on December 27, 2022 and can be seen until January 21, 2023 at Galerie Vito Schnabel, St. Moritz.
About the artists
Since the 1980s, Francesco Clemente has been immersed in an inner monologue, inspired by a heterogeneous spectrum of traditional and symbolic languages. Early in his career he focused on painting as a model of inner reconciliation and later pursued a symbolism-, allegory- and myth-inspired approach to pictorial composition that revolved around the body as the boundary between inner and outer self. While his oeuvre references the alchemical emblems and tantric lore of India’s philosophical, spiritual and aesthetic ideologies, the artist continues to draw on his fascination with Islamic mysticism through the writings of Henry Corbin and his personal encounters with Sufi teachings and music. in the wings of longing (2022), a new body of work on view in the exhibition, angels appear in Clemente’s iconography. His sensual and erotic lexicon of images springs from a diverse and complex landscape of cultures, distant legends and forgotten times and alludes to Shia cosmology, William Blake and the Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. Succinct and contemporary, his works express his quest to reflect on the arcane and understand life fully as non-linear. The paintings are rendered in a soft, fleeting palette of pastel and earth pigments on a grey-green slate ground wings of longing act like talismans that offer the viewer the calm expanse of the horizon and invite him to fly.
Known for his distinctive visual syntax and ingenious pictorial structure, David Salle orchestrates dynamic compositions that appropriate and reconstruct images in unlikely juxtapositions. His bravura paintings celebrate the complexity of painting’s plasticity and the way each part relates to the whole. Incorporating the language of film and cinematic techniques, Salle creates a pictorial space that is deliberately fragmented, playing with allusion and depth to create layered scenes that bring humor, drama and levity. Over the past four decades, his practice has consistently examined the way images are recognized and perceived. As the idiosyncratic conductor of composition, he directs the path the viewer’s eyes move within the canvas, insisting that we participate in the construction of narrative and meaning.
Old friends comprises a selection of large-scale paintings from 2018-2020, in which Salle juxtaposes a familiar cast of characters in black and white with vibrant, colorful imagery drawn from advertisements and mainstream media. His grisaille protagonists come from a single source: Peter Arno cartoons published by The New Yorker magazine in the 1930s and 1940s. and 50s. Attracted by their formal values of light and shadow, Salle here uses their forms as the backdrop for his paintings, capitalizing on the effects of mood and the way their contrasting tones draw attention at the pictorial level.
To illustrate the course of his long preoccupation with materiality and figuration, Julian Schnabel will present a selection of new and more recent works as well as an early panel painting from 1984 layering broken shards of ceramic on a wooden support – to explore the physical possibilities of the pictorial surface. His subjects are non-hierarchical, drawn from personal narratives and sources that encompass history and mythology while reflecting the artist’s interest in philosophy and contemporary thought and humor. To see in Old friends are two self-portraits by Caravaggio that Schnabel created in 2020. Exuberantly sculptural and tactile, the surfaces of these two panel paintings create visual splendor while suggesting a tension between identity and history. Schnabel explains: “Caravaggio painted his only self-portrait as Goliath, his severed head being held by young David. I made three Caravaggio paintings: two in which the actor Oscar Isaac posed because I wanted to paint Caravaggio in a lifelike way. You will only see David’s arm holding Caravaggio’s head in two of these paintings. The third is his self-portrait as Goliath.” The artist’s earliest exhibited work, pope music (1984) also deals with the subject of portraits.
Schnabel’s new paintings on panels and on velvet highlight the evolution of his visual language and the relationship manifested between figuration and abstraction. Velvet, which Schnabel has used as a material since the early 80s, is imbued with a weight and history of its own. Its flawless chromaticity surrenders to the artist’s gesture, yielding here and resisting Schnabel’s brush there. Schnabel uses modeling paste on velvet, layers up spray paint and oil, and sticks cotton balls onto the surface. Schnabel creates fractures and complex textures in which pigment and color seem to inhabit another pictorial space.
Gallery Vito Schnabel
Via Maistra 37 7500 St Moritz Switzerland
Old Friends: Francesco Clemente, David Salle, Julian Schnabel
Title of the event: Old Friends: Francesco Clemente, David Salle, Julian Schnabel
Event description: This winter, the Vito Schnabel Gallery presents Old Friends: Francesco Clemente, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, an exhibition that focuses on three epoch-defining New York artists whose work broke new ground in contemporary painting.
Start date: December 27, 2022
Deadline: January 21, 2023
Location Names: Gallery Vito Schnabel
Address: Via Maistra 37 7500 St Moritz Switzerland