DALLAS, TX.- Dallas Contemporary announces “An Artist Has a Past (Puffy Clouds and Strong Cocktails) 15 Paintings Over The Last Decade,” an exhibition of recent work by artist Julian Schnabel (American, b. 1951), on view April 11 through August 10, 2014. Schnabel demonstrates his continued intellectual curiosity and exploration into the artist’s role in society, utilizing the depth of his visual language and found materials to convey expansive themes such as time, obsession, suffering, redemption, and death. In “An Artist Has a Past,” Schnabel affirms his position among the most influential artists of our time and his continued relevance in the landscape of contemporary art.

“An Artist Has a Past” features fifteen large-scale paintings from the past decade that thoughtfully incorporate discovered objects and images, revealing Schnabel’s investigation and the exploration into infinite ways to paint. Among the works included in the exhibition are Untitled (Chinese) (2011), from a group of works inspired by an antique Chinese mirror; Untitled (Goya) (2007), a painting on a found awning, burnt by the sun, from a butcher shop in The Atlas Mountains of Morocco; and Untitled (Goodbye Mike Kelley) (2012), made shortly after the death of artist Mike Kelley, which incorporates a historical painting, on printed Dufour wallpaper, of the Revolutionary War.

“One of the most important and influential artists living today, Julian Schnabel is a seminal figure for all current painters,” explains Peter Doroshenko, Director of Dallas Contemporary. “This major exhibition of Schnabel's recent paintings from the last ten years is the first museum exhibition in the United States since 1987 when Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Modern, and Dominique Bozo, then president of the Centre Pompidou, curated a traveling exhibition that went from: Whitechapel Gallery, London, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco and ended up at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas where Schnabel once lived as a young painter. This exhibition will demonstrate Schnabel's vision and commitment to exploring new avenues of painting in every possible permutation of what a painting can be and what the artist’s role is in society. It is particularly appropriate that a major exhibition of Schnabel's work should be organized at this point in his life, considering his deep roots in Texas.”