Rene Ricard,
Untitled (As the Magician...), 2011
Oil and chalk on linen
72 x 40 inches (182.9 x 101.6 cm)
© The Estate of Rene Ricard; Photo by Stefan Altenburger; Courtesy the Estate of Rene Ricard and Vito Schnabel Gallery
Vito Schnabel and Rene Ricard were lifelong friends. They met in New York in the early 1990s, when Schnabel was 17 and began taking art-history classes with the revered poet and painter. Together they visited some of the country’s great museums—the Met, the National Portrait Gallery, and, a favorite of Ricard’s, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in his native Boston. It was there that young Schnabel first began thinking seriously about opening a gallery. Ricard died in 2014, but his work—raw, diaristic, and deeply entwined with the downtown New York art scene—endures. For the gallery’s 10th anniversary in Saint-Moritz, Schnabel is presenting art by Ricard that dates from 1989 to 2011