Frida Kahlo among Julian Schnabel's "Self-Portraits of Others"
03 September 2021
"Self-Portraits of Others" opens to the public on September 9, 2021 on the Brant Foundation in New York.
The exhibition shows twenty-five plate pintings created between 2018 and 2020, exploring the theme of portraiture throughout art history and the evolution of Schnabel’s artistic practice while making At Eternity’s Gate, a film about the life of Vincent van Gogh.
Julian Schnabel is an American painter and filmmaker born in New York in 1951 and raised in Brownsville, Texas. He is well-known for his cutting-edge method to artwork and filmmaking, particularly his large-scale work.
Schnabel’s first film was a biopic on the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. In 2018 he launched the movie about Vincent Van Gogh titled At Eternity’s Gate, which starred Willem Dafoe as the painter.
Self Portraits of Others displays his inventive evolution through the making of this movie. He has acknowledged that “every time requested do my movies affect my work, I’ve all the time replied no, my work have all the time influenced my movies till I made At Eternity’s Gate about Vincent van Gogh. The movie demanded that I paint van Gogh work as props and that I paint a likeness of Willem Dafoe as Vincent since he was inhabiting Vincent within the movie and the work wanted to seem like the actor.” He noticed that Van Gogh would make totally different fashions of his work, so he determined to show the props he made for the movie into work. He then produced totally different variations of the identical photographs of characters within the film.
He also created three paintings of Frida Kahlo, three self-portraits of Caravaggio, and three portraits of his son Cy as Velasquez and as the dead Christ from Titian’s last painting at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. He created a total of 25 self-portraits of others.
He says about Frida: "In the summer of 1968, I drove through Mexico. I was 16, and in the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes I came upon a life-size double portrait of a painter named Frida Kahlo. I’d never seen her work before; I’d never heard of her and I’d never seen anything like it. She was an unsung hero. Since then she became very famous, but that intimate moment of the two visible hearts of the same woman, one in a white wedding dress with spots of red blood from the open artery of the other, and the little amulet of Diego Rivera, stayed with me. I never imagined I would make a painting of that. I separated them and reconnected them as two paintings and made one other painting of a younger Frida."
That is the third Schnabel exhibition at The Brant Basis’s New York location.
NEW YORK September 9th to December 31st, 2021
