Mnuchin Gallery is proud to present Julian Schnabel: Plate Paintings, on view from November 6, 2025, through January 31, 2026. Comprised of eighteen works from 1978 to 2025, this exhibition constitutes the most comprehensive survey of Schnabel’s seminal plate paintings to date. Spanning nearly six decades, the exhibition traces how Schnabel not only invented but continuously reimagined one of the most materially defiant and conceptually ambitious bodies of work in contemporary painting. This exhibition, the gallery’s second devoted to Schnabel, will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue authored by Aram Moshayedi.

The genesis of the plate paintings lies in a 1978 trip to Barcelona, where Schnabel first encountered Antoni Gaudi’s mosaics. Upon his return to New York, he bought a box of plates from the Salvation Army, shattered them on the ground, and adhered the broken plates to wooden panels. The first of these works, The Patients and the Doctors, (1978) opened a new pictorial terrain for painting with its revolutionary, fractured and fossilized substrate. For Schnabel, the plate paintings were an epiphany—an evolving field of experimentation that he would revisit throughout his career. Though never conceived as a unified series, the medium expanded his capacity to embody monumentality, both in scale and in sentiment. In subsequent works like The Sea (1981) and The Mud in Mudanza (1982), whose immense compositions incorporated larger fragments of broken ceramics and found objects, Schnabel broadened the very possibilities of painting. As Éric de Chassey observes, Schnabel’s works are arenas in which painting becomes both image and event, a common place where the action of one becomes the shared experience of many.[1]

Schnabel’s compositions are rooted in the tension of contradiction. Works like The Red Hills Near Fez (Portrait of Jacqueline) (1985) and Untitled (Lobster Girl) (2016) evoke the long arc of portraiture and myth, recalling the reclining nudes of Titian or the stories of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, yet they remain tethered to the immediacy of the present. Likewise, in his self-portraits of others, Schnabel adopts the iconic visages of Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and Velázquez to confront mortality, memory, and the porous boundary between self and subject. His fragmentary surfaces testify to the impossibility of fixing the self in paint, embodying instead a multiplicity of being. These are images that resist resolution: devotional and defiant, monumental yet intimate in feeling, where thought and emotion, image and event, coexist in perfect tension.

Julian Schnabel: Plate Paintings offers a sweeping view of one of the artist’s most uncompromising achievements. With the plate paintings, Schnabel continues to refine an art form that fuses plasticity with meaning, gesture with consciousness. Confronting both the material and the metaphysical, the present exhibition is an invitation to experience the palpable weight of image-making itself.

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1 Éric de Chassey, PONCIFS*, 2018, p. 27.