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Lot 10W
Julian Schnabel(American, born 1951)Winnie Fung, 1989
15 May 2019, 17:00 EDT
New YorkSold for US$212,575 inc. premium
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Julian Schnabel (American, born 1951)
Winnie Fung, 1989
oil, plates and bondo on wood
72 x 60 x 5 in.
182.9 x 152.4 x 12.7 cm.
This work was executed in 1989.
oil, plates and bondo on wood
72 x 60 x 5 in.
182.9 x 152.4 x 12.7 cm.
This work was executed in 1989.
Footnotes
This work is registered in the Julian Schnabel Archives, New York, under inventory no. P89.0050.
Provenance
Private Collection (acquired directly from the artist)
Sale: Phillips, London, Contemporary Art Day Sale, 15 February 2013, Lot 142 (titled Winnie and dated 1988)
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner
When Julian Schnabel showed his first plate paintings in 1979, the sound of the broken crockery was heard around the world as a new chapter in painting was written. Bold and confident, Schnabel changed the trajectory of contemporary art by reintroducing the figure, and his confident mark making was hard to ignore. The 'Plate Paintings' from the 1980s are without a doubt Schnabel's signature works. The series, notable for their heroic scale, flamboyant texture, and distorted subjects, often of abstracted landscapes, allegorical subjects, and portraits of friends, was conceived in the mid-1970s after Schnabel visited Barcelona and was captivated by the work of Antonio Gaudí. Schnabel stated in an interview with Carter Ratcliff; "[...] I was in Barcelona for a while [in the summer of 1978] and looked at Gaudi's work; it had a certain kind of reflective quality and density of color and light that I felt hadn't really been used in painting, that was sort of off the ground and had a...pictorial possibility, besides the psychological one" (the artist in conversation with Carter Radcliff, www.interviewmagazine.com, October 1980, reprinted 5 January 2016).
The present work, Winnie Fung (1989) is not just a brilliant example of Schnabel's battle between what is pictorial and what is an object, but also takes on further importance due to the significance of its sitter. Winnie Fung was the first major Chinese collector of Western contemporary art and an early collector of Schnabel's work. In 1988 she acquired three plate paintings by Schnabel in London and it is believed they met in Los Angeles soon after.
In addition to being a painter, Schnabel is an academy award nominated film director who has also won awards at the Cannes Film Festival, the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs. He has recently been the subject of exhibitions at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, the Aspen Art Museum and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Tate Gallery, London, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
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