JULIAN SCHNABEL (Brooklyn, New York, 1951).
"Olympic".
Photograph with intervention.
Signed and dated.
Julian Schnabel originally made this work to form part of one of the 10 advertising posters painted by artists representing the Barcelona brand during the 1992 Olympics. However, it was censored by the Barcelona 92 Olympic Organising Committee, which considered it inappropriate due to its high degree of eroticism. It is therefore an unpublished work that represents a small part of the cultural legacy that the Olympics gave us.
Size: 83 x 66 cm; 108 x 90 cm (frame).
One of the parts of the project sponsored by Telefónica for the promotion of the Olympics was the creation of 58 advertising posters. This project, the most ambitious in the history of the Games, was grouped into four areas or collections: official Olympic posters, photographic sports posters, designers' posters and painters' posters. In the latter, in collaboration with Daniel Giralt Miracle, 10 artists were proposed to publicise the Barcelona brand, including this work by Schnabel. However, the high degree of eroticism emanating from the composition led COOB'92 to censor it.
With a practice close to expressionism, Schnabel's technique encourages objet trouvé and processes based on chance, on numerous occasions approaching sculpture and exploring new fields such as architecture and furniture. An award-winning film director (three of his films, "Basquiat", "Before Night Falls" and "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" have won him awards at Cannes as best director, and he has been decorated or nominated at the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs, the César and the Venice International Film Festival), Julian Schnabel made his artistic breakthrough with his "plate paintings", fragments of plates, assembled and polychromed, which he created after contemplating Gaudí's mosaics in Barcelona's Park Güell. His boldness, his energetic conception of art and the novelty of his techniques and decorations made him a transgressive figure in the art world, not exempt from controversy and eccentricity. His work currently forms part of the collections of several museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, among many others, as well as important private collections.