The exhibition Summer by the artist and film director Julian Schnabel (Brooklyn, New York, 1951) will open in the Tabacalera International Centre of Contemporary Culture in Donostia - San Sebastian on July 27th. The exhibition includes over sixty paintings and sculptures, with works from the 1980s to the present, and will occupy most of the ground floor of the building.

The artist has prepared the exhibition in dialogue with the building itself which remains more or less intact from its original use as a tobacco factory (Tabacalera) and is being restored as the International Centre of Contemporary Culture. On the occasion of this project, that comprises exhibitions at the Palzzo Venezia in Rome, the Rotonada della Besana in Milan and The Schloss Dernenburg in Germany, the artist is working with buildings full of memories and symbolism for the local public. As Max Hollein points out in the catalogue for the exhibition, Julian Schnabel “understand the notion of display and spatial context as an ever changing but integral part in the never ending evolution of a work of art … (when) exhibiting his works in extraordinary historic places such as the Cuartel del Carmen in Seville… Schnabel likes the changing effect, the interpretation that architecture can give to a painting, the marriage between the painting and location”.

The title of the exhibition,Summer, makes reference to the artist's way of working. For Schnabel, the summer season is the most productive of all, as it allows him to work out in the open and introduce nature in his paintings, which are altered by “stains, rain, mildew, bleached by the sun, accidents, blown by the wind; nature, at first a distraction, interfering then helping.”

In order to establish the narrative of the exhibition, Schnabel has included a selection of works from European and American private collections, the Collections of Bruno Bischofberger, Gian Enzo Sperone and Marco Voena as well as works from his own collection. The selection includes works that have never been exhibited and many series that have never been exhibited toghether. There will also be some works made in San Sebastian, were the artist has a home.

The exhibition reveals a wide range of Schnabel’s work, always conceived from his painter’s outlook and his absolute freedom when using different languages – “I had no hierarchical notions of images and materials that could be or should be paintings. I still don’t... Actually, there are no abstract paintings even if there are no figures in them. A painting can have an abstract image, but that doesn’t make a painting abstract. Paintings are utilitarian”.

The result is an exuberant, energetic and ever-changing body of work exixting on many different layers “Painting your guts out has never been an interesting idea or made an interesting painting. Feeling cannot be separated from intellect. In that sense, Neo-Expressionism doesn’t exist; it never has.”

On occasion of this exhibition, a book has been published by Skira with texts by William Gaddis (1922–1998), american writer author of The Recognitions; Max Hollein, director of Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt; David Moos, curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario; José Férez Kuri, curator at the William Burroughs Archive and Bruce Ferguson, director of exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario. The book is published in Spanish and in Basque, detailing 30 years of the artist's work.

The exhibition coincides with the International Cinema Festival of San Sebastian, of which Julian Schnabel is one of the main international ambassadors, and represents two of his best-known creative facets: painting and cinema for which Schnabel has also received international recognition, most recently in the form of the Best Director award at the Cannes International Film Festival for his film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Julian Schnabel has had individual exhibitions in the White Chapel Art Gallery in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Tate Gallery in London, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid and in Museums and Collections over the world. His work will also be exhibited this year in China, Hong Kong and Corea.

Exhibition:
Julian Schnabel, Summer
July 28th to October 21st 2007
Opening: July 27th
Visiting times: 11:30 am - 2:00 pm and 5:00 pm - 8:30 pm (closed on Mondays)

Tabacalera
International Centre of Contemporary Culture
Duque de Mandas, 52
20012 Donostia- San Sebastian
www.tabacalera.eu