Legendary Filmmaker Gus Van Sant on the Magic of Painting

Gus Van Sant’s new painting exhibition conjures a scrambled, abstracted storyboard translated onto large-scale, linen canvases. In eight new watercolors, all around 7-by-5 feet, Van Sant creates sympathetic protagonists: nude, larger-than-life men wandering alone through the Los Angeles landscape. They sit on and stomp over cars, at odds with the sprawling, automobile-littered metropolis. The pictures, on view at Vito Schnabel Projects through November 1st, resemble classic films, in which a giant figure towers over a city—Godzilla, for example, or King Kong—though the painter has moved the action westward.

Continue Reading