A photograph touches me when it opens my eyes and allows a detail to reach harmony. Julian Schnabel
For many years Julian Schnabel, the versatile American artist and director, has taken large format Polaroids using an old panoramic 20 x 24in Camera from 1970 which is as large as a fridge.
The selection of images on show at Forma in Milan, including both vibrant colour images and black and whites, also includes portraits of famous friends (Lou Reed, Placido Domingo and Mickey Rourke) and perfect strangers who caught his attention nonetheless.
His images reveal a deep, intimate poetry that mirrors the rhythm and events of his daily life as an artist. Indeed, some photographs show his family, his friends, his workspace, paintings that have just been finished, compositions he has made and objects that he has just observed casually.
These 80 large photographs (Schnabel has also intervened in some of them with paint) create a unique and complex fresco that gives us access to his private life, to his working environment and also gives us a glimpse of the constellation of objects, faces and places that make up his living space.
They are revealing moments of a particular and vibrant daily life, sincere and profound, enigmatic and fascinating.
The exhibition, curated by Petra Giloy-Hirtz, has been organized in collaboration with Di Chroma.
Julian Schnabel was born in New York City in 1951. He rose to fame at the beginning of the 80s with his Plate Paintings and built up an important body of works over the subsequent years including paintings, sculptures, works on paper and photographs. From the middle of the 90s he started to direct films: Basquiat (1996), Before Night Falls (2000), The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) and Miral (2010). His artworks have been exhibited in the principal museums of the world, such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Withney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum in New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, the George Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Tate in London.
Emiliana Tedesco
Polaroids, photographs by Julian Schnabel
From September 23 to November 20 2011
Fondazione FORMA per la Fotografia
Piazza Tito Lucrezio Caro 1
20136 Milano
02.58118067
