Julian Schnabel: Italy Through Its Trees presents map drawings and plate paintings centered on the umbrella pine — the iconic Pinus pinea of Rome's Villa Borghese and the groves surrounding his house in Ansedonia. Schnabel sourced 18th-century maps of Italy, reproducing them at large scale and laying down the thin trunks and luscious canopies of pines across their boundaries. The corresponding plate paintings, made on the floor with paint mixed directly on shattered crockery surfaces, mark the first time Schnabel has made drawings for paintings. Not depictions of trees but extensions of their essence, the works oscillate between the pictorial and the physical — "always congealing and becoming unhinged."
