Good Wall Painting: Filmmaker Gus Van Sant Will Debut a Series of New Paintings at Vito Schnabel’s Gallery This Fall

Add Gus Van Sant, the Palme d’Or-winning auteur behind films
such as My Own Private Idaho (1991), Good
Will Hunting (1997), and Milk (2008), to the
long—and growing—list of
Hollywood celebrities who are crossing over into visual art.

Art, however, is not just a passing hobby for Van Sant: he has
been making paintings since he first studied the medium at the
Rhode Island School of Design in the early 1970s. Now, he is
getting his first solo show in New York in September. The show,
“Recent Paintings, Hollywood Boulevard” at Vito Schnabel Gallery, brings together around a dozen
dreamy, watercolor-on-linen works Van Sant created in his LA studio
over the past two years.

“It’s like walking through both Gus’s life and imagination,”
Schnabel tells artnet News. “He put it all into a painting. Like
his films and photographs, this is just how Gus sees the
world.”

It’s not the first time Van Sant has shown his non-film creative
output to the world. His wide-ranging body of work, which also
includes photography and musical compositions, was presented in a
retrospective at Cinémathèque Française in Paris in 2016,
while he has shown his photographs for years with PDX
Contemporary Art in Portland. In 2011, he also presented watercolor
portraits in a collaborative exhibition with James Franco at
Gagosian in Beverly Hills. But the New York show, on view from
September 12 to November 1, presents a dreamier side to the
artist’s work.

The exhibition is the result of multiple chance meetings between
the director and the dealer. Schnabel, a longtime fan of Van
Sant’s, first introduced himself at an airport years ago. Van
Sant’s ability to traverse different media reminded him of another
artist he admired: his father, Julian Schnabel, whose career has
taken the opposite trajectory, parlaying art-world stardom into a
successful career as a director.

“Whether it’s Laurie Anderson or Tom Sachs or my old man, I love
when an artist feels the need to do something that might not be
expected of them, but is free enough to take the dive into
different worlds,” Schnabel says. “I really love that about
Gus.”

Van Sant has devoted an increasing amount of time to his studio
practice in recent years and was thinking about opportunities to
show his new work when he happened to run into Schnabel again last
year. The gallerist visited Van Sant’s studio, where he found an
outpouring of work, with paintings layered on top of one
another.

Prices for the works in the show are not yet set. A watercolor
the director created to hang in the office of Robin Williams’s
character in Good Will Hunting sold at Sotheby’s last
year in a sale of objects from Williams’s estate for $90,000, far
above the $1,000–1,500 estimate.

Van Sant has made a career of switching between avant-garde
indie films and big-budget studio projects. The work in his studio
suggested a similarly omnivorous appetite for painting styles.
During their last studio visit, Schnabel recalls Van Sant asking,
“Is it scary that there are so many different types of work here
that don’t look the same?”

“I just said, ‘No,” Schnabel replied, drawing a comparison
between Van Sant and the German artist Sigmar Polke, one of the
most respected yet elusive artists of the 20th century. “That’s one
of my favorite things about Sigmar Polke—the guy could make so many
different types of paintings.”

“Gus Van Sant: Recent Paintings, Hollywood Boulevard,” will
be on view at Vito
Schnabel Gallery from September 12 through November 1.

The post Good Wall Painting: Filmmaker Gus Van Sant Will
Debut a Series of New Paintings at Vito Schnabel’s Gallery This
Fall appeared first on artnet News.