JULIAN SCHNABEL

Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario plans a major retrospective of American artist Julian Schnabel this fall.The artist, best known for films such as Basquiat and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, says he thinks of himself primarily as a painter. The AGO show, which will take in his work from the 1970s to the present, will look at how cinematic personalities and themes run through his work as a painter."It has become abundantly clear, as Julian Schnabel's painterly vision has evolved, that cinema has served to germinate his pictorial imagination, inspiring his paintings in diverse and dynamic ways," David Moos, the AGO's curator of modern and contemporary, said in a statement announcing the retrospective.Schnabel himself will curate a film series running in conjunction with the exhibition, Films that Matter to Julian Schnabel.He'll also appear at Cinematheque to introduce his own 2000 film Before Night Falls and Pixote, a 1981 Brazilian film about street kids and criminal gangs directed by Hector Babenco.

-CBC
May 7 2010