Julian Schnabel

Italy Through Its Trees

On View
May 15 – Aug 14, 2026
New York

Pace will present 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”

Portrait of Italy Through Its Trees Painting on Map VIII by Julian Schnabel — Julian Schnabel, *Portrait of Italy Through Its Trees Painting on Map VIII*, 2025 © 2026 Julian Schnabel / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Portrait of Italy Through Its Trees Painting on Map X by Julian Schnabel — Julian Schnabel, *Portrait of Italy Through Its Trees Painting on Map X*, 2025 © 2026 Julian Schnabel / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Essays

On Seeing: Schnabel’s Umbrella Pines

By Oliver Shultz

While staying in Tuscany during the summer of 2025, Julian Schnabel began working on a new body of paintings that tenderly depict the iconic umbrella-shaped pine trees that proliferate in the central Italian landscape. Schnabel has a long and rich history with Italy and its trees, but he began thinking about these particular pines as a subject while living near the Villa Borghese in Rome during the filming of In the Hand of Dante (2025). The gardens surrounding the Villa are famously populated by Pinus pinea, the Italian stone pine, whose wide plumes of foliage resemble unfurled umbrellas. After work on the film was complete, Schnabel took refuge in Ansedonia, where his house was surrounded by a similar grove of trees. There, he created paintings on maps depicting the pines around the house. These works led to a corresponding group of plate paintings and map works exploring the same subject matter, which together are the subject of his new exhibition at Pace.

Schnabel recounts:

“When I was in Ansedonia, the landscape was filled with umbrella pines. I had brought some maps with me, since I like to work wherever I go. I laid the maps out in the courtyard of the garden. I was surrounded by the pines. I began to paint the trees onto the maps, noticing the variety of shapes that came out of the branches, and the shapes of the pine bushes growing on them, and the way the sky looked at the end of the day as the light was leaving. It was changing its shape. The way that the light would hit the trees as they would become silhouetted in front of the light. The Naples yellow or Mars yellow would come in and break the cerulean blue of the sky, making the darkness of the sap green and the black—so these colors started to build the shapes and give them a kind of musculature. I taped my brush to sticks and, since I was painting on the floor, I could load up the brush with quite a bit of paint and press onto the map. By doing that, working wet on wet, I could combine the colors into a single mark so that the bristles of the brush become the analog for the pine needles. Basically, I was painting in the light and the darkness. And supporting that, on these sort of spindle legs, are these branches that would come through and suspend the next row of pine needles.”

Portrait of Italy Through Its Trees III by Julian Schnabel — Julian Schnabel, *Portrait of Italy Through Its Trees III*, 2025 © 2026 Julian Schnabel / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In these plumes of the pine needles, Schnabel rediscovers a vocabulary of shape that has been present in his oeuvre from the beginning. He describes being fascinated not just by the shape of the trees, but by the way they seemed to enact a kind of organic drawing all their own. The meandering branches entwine each other before suddenly congealing into clumps of needles, which might suggest the tops of the tree, yet the branches extend still further to another layer. Schnabel likens these layered tiers of interwoven branches—each supporting successive “umbrellas”— to crutches, as if the trees were bodies, like us. “It feels as though there’s a kind of escalation inside the tree,” Schnabel explains, “like there are moments when the pine needles seem to grow.”

Trees have been a recurring motif in Schnabel’s oeuvre from the beginning—in the branch-like forms of the painted cracks in The Patient and the Doctors (1978), to the latticework of trees in The Student of Prague (1983). Even Schnabel’s infamous Portrait of God (1981) contains tree-like shapes branching from an amorphously figured godhead. Yet the umbrella pines of Ansedonia served a different function for Schnabel. Not just formal, they were also palliative. “I basically paint my way through life,” Schnabel explains. The life-giving power of trees remains a powerful undercurrent in Schnabel’s new body of work. “If you look at an X-ray of the inside of a human, you’d see these different tributaries, arteries, or veins,” he observes, “The branches are the veins of the trees. The water comes up through them and brings life.”

Portrait of Italy Through Its Trees XVII by Julian Schnabel — Julian Schnabel, *Portrait of Italy Through Its Trees XVII*, 2026 © 2026 Julian Schnabel / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Pinus pinea are icons of Italy itself and, by extension, Italian painting. Schnabel’s lifelong affinity for Italy and its art began in his twenties, when he first made pilgrimage to Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel and to see the paintings of Caravaggio and Piero della Francseca. “When you’re on your way to go to see these paintings, you find yourself in places you thought didn’t exist anymore,” Schnabel recalls. “There’s a kind of time travel that occurs.” In Italy—both in its landscapes and its built environment—there is the sense of the persistence of the past, a sense, as Schnabel puts it, “that something didn’tdisappear.” Schnabel’s trees are also time travelers. Those same trees might have been watching over Caravaggio and Piero when they painted. The umbrella pines are silent sentinels against oblivion—observing and remembering history for themselves.

Schnabel’s new paintings are also significant for uniting two different idioms of his practice: the plate paintings, on the one hand, and the paintings on maps, on the other. Schnabel has been painting both on broken crockery and on maps since the 1970s, when he first became interested in the idea of adopting a non-neutral ground for painting—a surface that would already be infused with meaning. This refusal of the “innocence” of the neutral canvas, so central to postwar Modernist orthodoxy, is ultimately a formal maneuver. Schnabel’s maps were not chosen for their particular meaning but rather for their visual effect. Through appropriation, they are transmuted into objects drained of signification. What interests Schnabel is the way the lines of the map interact with the branches of the trees. In essence, he dispenses with the utilitarian use of the map to discover in them a kind of purely aesthetic functionality.

Portrait of Italy Through Its Trees V by Julian Schnabel — Julian Schnabel, *Portrait of Italy Through Its Trees V* (detail), 2025 © 2026 Julian Schnabel / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Schnabel’s new plate paintings are also unique in deriving directly from the map works. “I’ve never made drawings for paintings before,” he notes. “Because of that, I painted the plate paintings a different way. I painted them 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, crimson and mineral violet.” Schnabel reflects on how the paintings capture different times of day and qualities of the light as it filters through the trees. “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. That was unusual for me to be doing.”

Physically inhabiting the painting 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 that break up the marks and allowing them to make other kinds of shadows that are inside the green and the sky.” 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,” he adds, “but not really pictures of trees.”