Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/749295
culturedmag.com 285 seen before," he says. A trip to Spain, particularly his communion with Antoni Gaudí's ceramic- studded works in Barcelona, planted the seed. "I thought, What if those colored shards in the benches were white?" As he leafs through some of the works on the Aspen checklist, it's clear that these are his children and reuniting them will be an emotional experience for him. "This particular painting has been in Des Moines Art Center for 20 years," he says of The Death of Fashion (1978). "I don't get to see these very often." Schnabel, that famous bad boy of the art world, is now 65, and that enforces a certain perspective. "It's a good thing," he says of the show's bringing the works together. "As you get older, you get more and more removed from everything." I've always thought there was a Pompeiian flavor to the plate paintings, and that Schnabel was making a comment on the long arc of art history—the fact that millennia after paintings have melted or turned to dust, ceramics will still be around. "There's an archeological aspect in a way," he tells me. "But that's not the end-all, be- all. It was more like, What is the substrate of time? It's about the signifiers that the plates have, the familiarity and the scale of them. As a painter, you look for all the multiplied possibilities of what a mark can do." Schnabel has a very bird's-eye view of his project. "They figured into something that represented my whole pursuit—there was a battle between what the object was and a picture," he says. "Where those two things converged, that's the space where I was working." And it's where he still works. Schnabel takes me in an elevator to yet another floor of Palazzo Chupi, into a warmly wood-paneled space that he uses as a personal gallery, and it's filled with new canvases. I'm sworn to secrecy about what they entail, but you may see them at Pace Gallery next spring. They may—or may not!—take another very famous painter as inspiration. Schnabel stands back to drink them in, then leans forward to get a micro-view of their surface. This is where he lives. Schnabel tells me matter-of-factly that, for him, "Painting is like breathing." The Death of Fashion, 1978