McClain Gallery is pleased to present "Julian Schnabel: Works on Paper", the first exhibition of "map drawings" in over a decade. The exhibition opens to the public Saturday, February 3, 2007 with a reception for the artist from 6:30 to 8:30 pm. True to Schnabel’s form, he is appropriating dated coastal maps as an underpinning for a personal narrative. Gifted to him by a friend in the 1980s, the used nautical map’s history is transformed into a poetic record of Schnabel’s own past experiences. The consistent imagery of the completed drawings is evidence of Schnabel impressions of exotic landscapes – full of palm trees; tall, graceful, stubby even weatherworn. In some ways these palm trees invoke the human figure or even portraiture. The making of map drawings has continued through Schnabel’s career, serving as a kind of visual diary of his travels.

Schnabel has established himself as one of the significant creative voices of his generation. As a painter, sculptor, filmmaker, stage set designer and architectural designer, he has collaborated with artists of almost every discipline of the visual and performing arts. Schnabel began his career as an artist at the University of Houston and was the subject of his first one-person museum exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston in 1976. His works have been exhibited all over the world and has been the subject of retrospective exhibitions at the Tate Gallery, London, The Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, The Tamayo Museum, Mexico City, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, and numerous other museums.He is an award-winning film director with the features "Basquiat" and "Before Night Falls" to his credit.  Schnabel currently lives and works in New York City, Montauk, New York, and San Sebastian, Spain.