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Julian Schnabel On Showcasing the Essentials at Château La Coste

In Provence, nine colossal paintings plus a tightly curated selection of plate works shine a light on the artist's career-long commitment to deploying surprising materials.

Artist Julian Schnabel’s five-decade career has pivoted around using repurposed materials, from wax to velvet, as fresh surfaces; his most recent subversion is handling a paintbrush elongated by a stick. His work is currently on view in the south of France at the resplendent Château La Coste, which has 40 al fresco installations and sculptures scattered across the 500-acre site, plus five indoor galleries.

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At Galerie des Ancien Chais is a sampling of nine monumental works drawn from across Schnabel’s career. A painting from 1975 is the earliest in the show; the use of a boxing ring floor for The Edge of Victory (1987) reflects how he was constantly flipping what can or should be used as an art surface. His most recent work is a Plate Painting that stars himself from 2023, showcasing a dapper hat, his signature glasses and a striped robe. The edit was chosen with curator Donatien Grau, head of contemporary programs at Musée du Louvre; the two worked together on a Musée d’Orsay show in 2018, “Orsay vu par Julian Schnabel,” in which the artist selected works from the prestigious collection alongside his own productions.

In the neighboring Bastide Gallery, is a cluster of Umbrella Pines, also shown this spring at Pace, that resonate with the French estate’s cypresses, stone pines, olive trees and oaks. His ongoing Plate Paintings series, which he began in the 1970s fashioned from shattered dishware, takes inspiration from Antonio Gaudí’s mosaics throughout Barcelona.

Observer spoke via video with the artist, who was in his Hamptons home in between a surfing session and a massage.

Where am I catching you?

You’re in my kitchen in Montauk. [He moves the screen around.] These drawings were made in 1978. That one says “for Piero Manzoni, for Lou Reed: ‘I’m gonna stop wastin’ my time. Somebody else would have broken both of her arms.'” That’s a Henry Fox Talbot photograph, one of the first photographs ever.

Jorge Galindo made this. This is an old collage from the ’90s. I’m walking into the living room.

Is every room filled with art?

Yeah, all the rooms. That’s from 1980. And that’s from 1636.

[He walks outside.] That’s a sculpture of mine called Ahab. There’s another one here called Idiota that I made in Spain in 1988. It’s bronze… I’ll sit here in the garden.

In the press materials, the nine paintings are described as “the most loved.” What determines the hierarchy of “most loved” among your creations?

I think that’s Donatien saying that, and he’s seeing if I’m agreeing with him.

I think that each of these paintings is emblematic of a particular moment. They encapsulate something, they represent a group of paintings. For example, Untitled (Los Patos del Buen Retiro III), the one that says “Nip” on it… I made five paintings that were that size; there were four painted on some light-colored tarps that belonged to the Reina Sofía. So that stands as a representative of that. “Los Patos del Buen Retiro” means the ducks in the Buen Retiro, the lake in the middle of the park in Madrid. I fell in that lake, kind of depressed. I went out on a rowboat and fell off the rowboat and watched the lake come between me and my glasses, and then thought, well. When I gave this course to the Círculo de Bellas Artes, I told these........

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