Julian Schnabel's Paintings at Pace Are Two Different Bodies, Made Two Different Ways

♦ ♦ ♦ JULY 13, 2026 | 3 MIN READ Julian Schnabel's Paintings at Pace Are Two Different Bodies, Made Two Different Ways TLDR: Cross-town for “Italy Through Its Trees” at Pace, seventeen works split between painting s made facing a wall and painting s built lying on the floor under the artist’s own weight, hung together as if that difference doesn’t show. It does. Walk into Pace’s West 25th Street space right now and you’re standing between two kinds of object that happen to share a subject. Julian Schnabel’s painting s, on view through August 14, all circle the umbrella pine, the wide, flat-topped stone pine that fills the gardens around Villa Borghese in Rome, where Schnabel was living while shooting his film “In the Hand of Dante.” One group is painted on enlarged 18th-century Italian maps, worked upright, the tree forms threaded through the old cartographic lines like a second set of roads laid over the first. The other group is the plate painting s, oil and broken crockery pressed into bondo on aluminum, made on the floor, Schnabel standing directly on the shattered dishes while he works. Why a painting made lying down reads differently once it’s hung upright Here’s what a painter notices that a straight review of the imagery won’t flag: those two bodies of work were built with gravity pointing in opposite directions relative to the final image. The map paintings were made the way most paintings are made, facing a vertical surface, so up stays up the whole time a mark gets laid down. The plate paintings were built flat, the plates smashed and set into wet bondo underfoot, then the sky (Naples yellow ground, cerulean above it) and the branches (crimson, mineral violet) worked in from directly overhead. When that surface gets stood up and hung at eye level, the picture has to convince you it always knew which way was up, even though for every hour of its making it didn’t. You can feel the difference standing in front of them. The map works have the settled logic of something composed looking straight at itself. The plate paintings have a rawer, more collided quality, like the image arrived at the wall a beat after the object did. What “not really pictures of trees” means once you’re standing in the room Schnabel has said it himself, plainly: “They are pictures of something, but not really pictures of trees.” Standing in the gallery, that reads as an instruction about how to look, not a hedge. The Brooklyn Rail’s review calls the seventeen-piece show “superb” and picks up on the same thing formally, describing the pine needles as “analogous to the needles of the brush,” which is exactly the kind of detail that survives translation from object to image and the kind that doesn’t. Hung side by side, the map paintings ask to be read as image first, surface second. The plate paintings refuse that order entirely, the shattered crockery under the paint layer insists on being felt as object before it resolves into tree. A painting made on the wall believ