Julian Schnabel, Untitled (Self-Portrait), 2023, oil, plates, and bondo on aluminum, photo by Tom Powel Imaging; Private Collection, Courtesy Vito Schnabel Gallery
Julian Schnabel takes over Château La Coste this spring with a focused survey spanning five decades of practice, opening at the Galerie des Anciens Chais from 25th April to 15th August 2026.
Bringing together a rare selection of key works, the exhibition—curated in dialogue with Donatien Grau—traces Schnabel’s restless, material-driven approach to painting. From early wax and velvet works to his iconic plate paintings and more recent experiments, the show unfolds as a sustained refusal of convention, where surface, gesture and material collide.
Schnabel has long treated painting as an act of intervention—mark-making as both physical trace and temporal imprint. Early works such as Jack the Bellboy A Season in Hell (1975) build dense, tactile surfaces from plaster, oil, mesh and industrial compounds, establishing a language rooted in accumulation and chance. Elsewhere, The Edge of Victory (1987), painted on repurposed boxing ring fabric, folds lived history directly into the surface, turning material into both image and metaphor.