Rene Ricard
Vito Schnabel Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Rene Ricard: and if you arrive, do you know you are there? on December 29, 2025 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the St. Moritz gallery. The show is a tribute to an artist who helped shape the gallery’s history and vision.
“It’s an honor to be able to celebrate our tenth anniversary in St. Moritz with an artist who has been such an important part of the gallery since the beginning. Rene helped form the way I think about art. It’s been an extremely impactful ten years since I took over the gallery space from Bruno Bischofberger, and I’m looking forward to what’s to come in the future.” – Vito Schnabel
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Rene Ricard (1946–2014) was an American poet and painter. Ricard’s work has appeared in influential literary, art, and popular publications and he has contributed profoundly to the cultural discourse of his era. At age eighteen, he moved to New York City and became a protegé of Andy Warhol and part of the scene surrounding The Factory. He appeared in such classic Warhol films as Kitchen and Chelsea Girls. By the early 1980s, having achieved stature in the art world through his influential essays, Ricard was acknowledged for discovering Jean-Michel Basquiat, and for helping launch the career of Keith Haring. His breakthrough 1981 essay “The Radiant Child” in Artforum magazine is considered to be at the forefront of 20th Century art writing. In 1979, Dia Art Foundation inaugurated its publishing arm with Rene Ricard 1979-1980.
In the late 1980s, Ricard began to develop his poems into paintings. Occasionally Ricard would paint directly on antique prints or found paintings. In his later work, Ricard expanded his ambition, working on a larger scale with fully integrated imagery and text. Schnabel has presented five solo exhibitions over the last twenty years of Ricard’s work in New York, Los Angeles, and London.
Vito Schnabel and Rene Ricard were lifelong friends. When Schnabel turned 17, he started taking informal art history classes with Ricard, during which they would visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other museums, from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. to The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, to the Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston, Ricard’s hometown. Ricard was incredibly influential in Schnabel’s life and his decision to open a gallery.
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Rene Ricard: and if you arrive, do you know you are there? will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in St. Moritz, and will feature six works dating from 1989 to 2011. The exhibition was organized in collaboration with the artist's estate, which the gallery represents, and will remain on view through April 4, 2026.
