NEW YORK, NY.- Pace presents Julian Schnabel: Italy Through Its Trees, a presentation of a new body of paintings by the artist, at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York from May 15 to August 14. Comprised of paintings on maps and plate paintings featuring the native Italian umbrella pine, the exhibition signals a new chapter in Schnabel’s decades-long relationship with the country through two of his longest running bodies of work.

Since Schnabel’s first visit to Italy in his twenties, when he made a pilgrimage to see Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel and the paintings of Caravaggio and Piero della Francesca, the country’s landscapes, architecture, and antiquities have been a powerful source of inspiration. Schnabel began thinking more deeply about these particular Italian trees as a subject last year, while living near the Villa Borghese in Rome during the filming of his forthcoming feature film, In the Hand of Dante. The gardens surrounding the Villa are famously populated by Pinus pinea, the “Italian stone pine,” whose wide plumes of foliage resemble unfurled umbrellas. After production of the film was complete, Schnabel took refuge in Ansedonia, where his house was surrounded by a similar grove of trees. There, en plein air, he began work on a group of paintings on maps depicting the pines around the house. These works led to a corresponding group of plate paintings exploring the same subject matter, which together comprise the exhibition at Pace.

Schnabel first began painting on maps in 1979, challenging the map’s utilitarian value to discover in it a more aesthetic functionality. For his new compositions in this series, he sourced maps of Italy from the eighteenth century, reproducing them at a large scale and using their boundaries as guides for his own mark-making. In these works, the thin trunks and luscious canopies of umbrella pines both follow and cut across the edges of the landscapes in a lattice of abstract marks. In laying down these lines, Schnabel claims new conceptual and graphic territory, forming images that address the persistence of the past and its shifting nature over time.

The new plate paintings, a series he first started in 1978, are unique in that they derive directly from the map works. “I’ve never made drawings for paintings before,” Schnabel says. “Because of that, I painted the plate paintings in a different way, on the floor. Instead of putting down a dark ground, I gave them a ground of Naples yellow, then between the blue and the Naples yellow, I could deal with whatever the sky became, then the branches, in crimson and mineral violet.”

First applying shattered crockery to the canvas to create a dynamic, textured surface, Schnabel navigates its chance forms with a brush, once again responding to the existent pictorial framework to create enveloping canopies that are sheltering and expansive while capturing varying qualities of light. “I was literally standing on the paintings—standing on a bunch of broken dishes with a brush taped to a stick,” he explains, “and mixing the paint on the surface of the paintings, while standing on top of the paintings. That was unusual for me to be doing.”

Physically inhabiting the paintings while he made them, the works that emerged capture the spontaneity of Schnabel’s process. He worked “as if the paintings were completely flat,” he explains, “almost ignoring the stoppages of the surface breaks up the marks, and allowing them to make other kinds of shadows that are inside the green and the sky.” This layered, physical process is itself representative of the role of trees for humanity—ancient and protective, they are silent witnesses to the passing of the centuries.

Schnabel’s paintings are ultimately exercises in abstraction—they suggest a notion of how abstraction lurks within the visible world as a possibility within forms. They reveal the prehistory of the trees before they had names. “It’s the idea of seeing,” Schabel says of these paintings, which oscillate between the pictorial and physical—the needles of the pines analogous to the needles of the brush. “They are always congealing and becoming unhinged.” In this way, Schnabel’s new paintings are not depictions of trees but rather extensions of the life or essence of the tree through the language of painting. “They are pictures of something,” Schnabel adds, “but not really pictures of trees”