María de Corral López-Doriga Libri

Observers of contemporary art associate the name Julian Schnabel with highly evocative, large-scale paintings. At the time of his early exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe in the 80s, the larger-than-life Schnabel was loudly hailed as a new milestone in the development of painting, the savior of an art form declared dead years before. Still painting some of the most massive canvases around, Schnabel is a virtually unrivalled master in the use of "bigness" and a broad range of materials. Fragmentation and overlapping play an important role in his art, in terms of both material and content. If his paintings don't exhibit a consistent style, why should they? Instead, they combine oil painting and collage techniques, classical pictorial elements inspired by historical art, Neo-Expressionist features, as well as figuration and abstraction, gesture and structure. This volume presents a broad selection of Schnabel's paintings in a survey of his diverse oeuvre, with emphasis placed on works from 1990 to the present.

The book produced to accompany the presence of João Louro (*1963 in Lisbon) as the official representative of Portugal at the 56th Venice Biennale with the exhibition I Will Be Your Mirror—Poems and Problems is presented as the state of the art of Louro’s oeuvre, which, since the nineties, has developed a well-informed questioning of the meaning of the image as an object or sign and of language as a symbolic representation. Louro is an intensely conceptual artist, one whose intensity is demonstrated in his presentation and interpretation of the world. He is interested in generating new semantic aspects and raising doubts about norms accepted by our visual culture. The texts by María de Corral, Paulo Herkenhoff, Delfim Sardo, and Nuno Crespo, authors who have a deep knowledge of João Louro’s work, are accompanied by images that show us the overall body of João Louro's production, including some works produced specifically for this exhibition.