fluttuazioni

Palazzo Marin, Venice, Italy

09-28 May 2017

“When I’m in an airplane and I look out of the window, and I see the clouds, I can imagine castles and kingdoms, with caves... I just was trying to paint that world that we go into when we become part of the ether.” Lola Montes Schnabel, Venice, May 2017

A fascination with the sky is something that Lola shares with her longtime friend, fellow artist Vahakn Arslanian. For her “FLUTTUAZIONI” show launched during the May 2017 Venice Biennale, she decided to share the poetic, historic space of the Palazzo Marin with some of his works. “I wanted to make a kind of ‘synesthetic salon,’ where there was a certain scent in the room, where you really felt something. The theme of this Biennale is ‘Vive Arte Vive,’ I wanted to live something that is inspired. I was having conversations about what it is to grow up with artists, musicians, poets, actors, people that make things. An exhibition is not just something that you peer into in a white space, but something that you inhabit, that you become part of the art itself by being in the room,” she explains. Thus along side her expressive, vibrantly colourful large-scale paintings, works on paper and repurposed Victorian photograph albums full of images from many years of peregrinations, are placed Arslanian’s hand-crafted objects that belie his obsession with planes, birds and the detritus of New York City. A central room of the also show plays host to Schnabel’s new film, which operates as a striking moving-image portrait of Vahakn at work with his materials of glass, metal and sheer force. For centuries this magical, mythical city has been a cultural nexus, and this show is a deliberate exercise of cross-pollination, says Lola: “I wanted many rooms because I wanted to create a world where the film connects to his sculptures, to the portraits I have done of other people, to my more abstract oil paintings, which are really about the light in Venice. I made these paintings in New Jersey, thinking about the light in Venice.”

Texting Spirits

Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center

Novembre 29, 2016 - January 29, 2017

The exhibition is an essay on the metaphysics of objects, the aesthetic sense of art, and the rarefaction of sensory perception to the point where art reaches its essential and definitive dimension beyond the visual.

Schnabel presents a series of large scale paintings, two video projections and a body of watercolor drawings. As the artist states: I've always done filmmaking and painting simultaneously; they are connected. Sometimes I'll make a film to conceive one image that didn't exist before, then the image becomes a painting. There's a process to all of this and I'm interested in all of the layers – if I hadn't made that one camera frame then these paintings wouldn't exist. Every idea deserves a different medium to illustrate it best.

Schnabel's exhibition is mainly concerned with the study of an unreal and Arcadian nature, where the human figure is rarely present, unless at a level of an archetypical consciousness. Her canvases translate as visions of nature in various moods: on this base she paints elements as the ancient olive trees so ethereal and detached from representation. Like details in some backgrounds in Renaissance paintings, magnified, where the spiritual dominates the narrative.

It is in her films though that the poetry and the purity of her sprit becomes most visible: a man running in a snow landscape in an endless effort to reach a world that perhaps goes beyond the limits of the senses (Rishi Running, 2004). A Dialogue Between Spirit And Nature, 2011 demonstrates her multifarious practice encompassing a variety of disciplines, bringing music (Charlemagne Palestine), sculpture (Luigi Ontani), dance, and theater (masks by Balinese naive artists) into contact with rituals and liturgies, which Schnabel intuitively orchestrates. Like in hypnotic tunes, where new ways of juxtapositions bring together unconventional and heterogeneous materials into a revelation of the soul.

As Antonitsis emphasizes: There is no crack in Lola's song, nor in the joy of her listeners.

Akashic Records

Tripoli Gallery

July 31 - August 17, 2015

East Hampton, NY – Tripoli Gallery is pleased to present Lola Montes: Akashic records. The exhibition will be on view at Tripoli Gallery East Hampton, 87 Newtown Lane, from July 31st through August 17th, 2015.

In theosophy and anthroposophy, the Akashic records (a term coined in the late 1800s from akasha or ākāśa, the Sanskrit word for “sky,” “space,” “luminous,” or “æther”) are a compendium of thoughts, events, and emotions believed by Theosophists to be encoded in a non-physical plane of existence known as the astral plane. There is no scientific evidence for existence of the Akashic records.

How to paint and what to paint is the central issue and question that all painters face. This could be said about life and how to live and what to do. The painters’ practice leads them to find their particular version and voice using tools that have been here before, but inventing a set of uses that are particular to them. Lola Montes is a maker of hallucinogenic scenes configuring into namable and unnamable, personal figurative works that are at home with Antonin Artaud and Jack Smith. Images, clear and cryptic, like in dreams where the unconscious mind connects the rational and irrational into poetry. Her exploration into film and her travels to far away places infuse her works with the exotic land of mystery and self-discovery. We are exhibiting five paintings that show the transition from ether to form, from drawing into painting, from etching into painting, painted and carved onto a pristine painted wooden surface. These works function as a solution and a question of what to do and how to make a personal work of art.

Heaven

Miami Basel at Shelbourne Hotel

2014

Lola Montes, a New York-based painter and filmmaker will present a recent series of paintings in the café and lobby of the Shelborne Wyndham Grand South Beach, located at 1801 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach. Taking place in conjunction with Art Basel Miami Beach, the installation, will be on view from December 1 through December 8, 2014. A reception celebrating the artist and Art Basel Miami Beach will take place on Monday, December 1, 2014 at 8p.m.5.

The series are about Heaven and the artist’s expression of a place that may exist but cannot be seen, “a city in the clouds of a moon beam.” Montes has refrained from using the color white, instead physically making the colors from pigments that glow from within to reflect colors unimaginable on the human plane. Montes adds, “I want the pictures to be transcendent and take you to a far-away place you know exists but cannot see. In this series, I have thought about the invisible space that ancient cultures would devote ceremonies to and how that same invisible space is what holds our data from technology, and how those two worlds fuse and where they meet.”

Within Reach

Tripoli Gallery

January 16 – February 11, 2013

New York, NY - Tripoli Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by Lola Montes Schnabel entitled Within Reach. Tripoli Gallery will open the New Year with a pop-up gallery space at 980 Madison Avenue, on the 3rd Floor, where Ms Schnabel will debut her most recent paintings with an opening reception from 6 to 8pm on January 16th.

In Within Reach, Lola explores the most primal and paradoxical human instincts, the desire to be boundless. The series of oil paintings and watercolors evoke oceanic realms whose landscapes and figures remain ceaselessly ephemeral yet always connected, bound by a kindred condition. As one painting leads to the next, landmasses morph into figures and a progression is revealed. The paintings become discoveries and dictate their own development. Her deliberate choice of medieval yellow and crimson, consistent in all of her paintings, construct a mise-en-scène in which her changing forms interact to tell a story. Her paintings are frozen vignettes in time that speak to Lola’s strong background in filmmaking.

Captured in the imagery of the series Within Reach, are glimpses of the struggling subconscious. Submerged primordial visions are illuminated and dreams made real, shapes regress to abstraction and colors are rediscovered in their elemental vibrancy. "Looking at a painting presents a chance to stop thinking," Lola explains, "you enter an unknown space that eventually belongs to you. Without taking a step forward you are transported to a plateau or an arena, an invented place where the artist lives. These are landscapes of a new nature or of the very first piece of ground we found beneath our feet, a place we have no documentation of."

Lola’s treatment of this dynamic can be at once intensely personal and also playful, occasionally even ironic. She portrays the areal complexities of water with the languid strokes and murky lyricism of a dream. In these liminal worlds, individual elements long to absorb the larger spaces they inhabit, and yet attempt to elude the wholeness in which they exist. Lola explains that her amorphous red skies are inspired by the title “Red Desert”, an Antonioni film.

In the painting “Neither Here Nor There”, the figure hesitates at the foot of a field, torn between unknown fears and fascinations, paralyzed by and drawn into the very wilderness that seems to underscore the series of paintings as a whole. Is this an abyss, another world, an experience beyond our grasp, or is it within reach?

Night Vision

Tripoli Gallery

August 16 - September 13, 2012

Southampton, NY – Tripoli Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Lola Montes Schnabel. The exhibition entitled Night Vision will be presented at 30A Jobs Lane, Southampton New York from August 16 – September 11.

This exhibition of thirteen recent paintings by Lola Montes Schnabel is a series born from the artist's experimentation with constraints. Lola sets up a single burning candle in total darkness and studies the burning wick as it illuminates the room, forming a relationship between the flame and her painting. She constrains herself further with a palette of only black, gold and tints of white; the colors affected by the flame that is both constant and shifting. "This single candle provides a boundless realm set against the infinite blackness. It connects me to all other humans who have watched a flame in the dark," says Lola. Within this space, she enters a place of psychedelic enlightenment where images take form in the dimensions of her mind's eye.

Inspired by filmmaker, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s notion of “psychomagic,” which consists of shamanic acts assigned to heal one's subconscious, Lola allows her own mystical arrangements to emerge. Her works illustrate the juxtaposition between light and darkness; a delicate and diminutive light that finds strength and expression in the surrounding pervasive darkness.

Love Before Intimacy

The Hole

December 16th, 2011 – February 4th, 2012

The Hole is proud to present a new group of paintings by Lola Montes Schnabel. These five works, created over the period of the last year, comprise a suite of allegorically suggestive figurative paintings that use a shared five-color palette to great effect.

Each painting depicts an episode in a narrative of androgenous youth encountering each other on a remote Greek island. They depict a time of love before sexuality, with the nude youths, occasionally shrouded in sheepskins, romping playfully about the teal and tan landscape. In one work, a youth drags a dead albatross across an expanse, in another, the last in the series, the two figures come together in ecstasy, forever changing their innocent, idyllic world.

The works each begin with bleached linen and rabbit glue. Lola then engaged the surface with a five color palette reminiscent of the restrictive color schemes of the Spanish Romantics or the lucky five-color Ko-Kutani school of Japanese ceramics. Not just paint but asphalt, plaster weld, and copper plating solution are part of her toolbox, making the painting not just an assorment of emmoliated pigments, but the site of a rich alchemical reaction as the plasterweld slowly dries clear and the copper plating oxidizes and chrystallizes.

Magic, luck and intuition fill these large, confident, and very feminine tableaux. Lola graduated from Cooper Union in 2008 and has been in numerous group shows since, with both her paintings, her iodine works on paper, photographs and video work. This is her first solo painting exhibition in the United States.

Iodine Portraits

Tripoli Gallery

August 5 ‐ September 8, 2011

On Thursday, August 18th, Lola Montes Schnabel will have her 2nd solo exhibition at the Tripoli Gallery with her recent Iodine Portraits.

The artist who graduated from Cooper Union will be showing her latest work, a series of portraits painted with shellac ink and iodine.

“When I'm drawing someone I'm not as interested in drawing there likeness as I am in recording the experience I’m having with them and making a physical body of that. I am using white Ink on white paper so the act of doing, is almost invisible. It is not until I pour iodine onto the paper the results appear.” - Lola Montes Schnabel.

Infinite Blinding Beam

Tripoli Gallery

July 26, 2009

Film, photo, painting, drawing, and sculpture are all mediums affected by light and they can be used to demonstrate how luminosity is displaced and directed onto various surfaces.

Having graduated from the Cooper Union, in the spring 2008, after applying twice and excepted the third time under a pseudonym, Lola Montes Schnabel continues to explore the mixed media she has always used to portray her vision. Working with different mediums throughout her lifetime, including film, video, paintings and drawings, Lola’s innate fascination with light and its effects have been the premise of the development for this body of work.

"This whole show is about color and inventive ideas for capturing light on a surface and the materials used to do so. Whether they be matte or shiny, opaque or transparent, each technique helps me understand the mystery of light," explains Ms. Schnabel

Having recently opened the widely talked about Tripoli Gallery of Contemporary Art, with its first exhibition—an energetic and uplifting show of large paintings by Felix Bonilla Gerena—Tripoli Patterson is excited to be working once again with an artist he exhibited in his first group shows of 2004 and 2005.

“I am thrilled to be coming back together with Lola to work on this new show. It will be interesting to see where we go now, after these few years where we both have had time to grow. With this exceptional new space, and her incredible new body of work, I can’t wait to see the outcome,” says Mr. Patterson.

The exhibition is titled, Infinite Blinding Beam, which title has personal significance to the artist. “It is spiritual and comes from a text I was reading and is significant to the work in this show,” she says.

Lola studies the affect that light has on different surfaces and its involvement with different mediums, by using a number of innovative techniques to create the pieces in this exhibit.

In one study, coating wood panels with gesso, Lola applies a pink translucent material called plaster mold, which is normally used to prevent molding on walls. Her line drawings then go on top of the prepared panel with white shellac ink.

In another study, Disappearing Ink Drawings, Lola further analyzes the concept of using white to draw. Here, using white ink on antique baby blue paper, she doses her drawing with iodine, which is absorbed by the paper and the ink. While drying takes place, the iodine eats away at the dense white lines of the drawing, creating a unique separation of texture and color.

Group Show

Tripoli Gallery

October 2006

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A Travelling Show

Studio Chia, Rome

2005

Essere figli d’arte non è certo sinonimo di successo, anzi a volte può diventare una difficoltà in più per emergere, per affermarsi autonomamente. Filippo Chia e Lola Schnabel espongono insieme per la prima volta in Italia e nonostante la loro giovanissima età (22 e 23 anni), si presentano con uno stile già ben definito. In comune hanno la stessa voglia di raccontare, di mostrare momenti di vita reale. Creando una sorta di album dei ricordi, nel caso di Chia composto da foto, mentre per la Schnabel da disegni, video, fotografie rielaborate e incisioni.

Lola Montes Schnabel presenta un lavoro fortemente autobiografico, raccontato attraverso due video, una serie di incisioni dal tema erotico, fotografie e una piccola statua in bronzo. Sua nonna, un’arzilla novantreenne, si è prestata come co-protagonista nel video, seguendo un iter che la mostra in varie fasi della sua vita e in diverse situazioni. La vediamo quindi interpretata da una bambina, poi a cavallo, poi legata ad un albero e stesa su un prato. L’altro video mostra invece il bacio appassionato che Lola diede a John Fisk (esponente della beat generation) nel bel mezzo di un presepe vivente, poco prima della sua morte per alcolismo. La creatività della giovane artista è rappresentata al meglio dalle polaroid, rielaborate in una sorta di collage, dall’ingrandimento della foto di un coperchio di un contenitore arabo e ancora in una foto della nonna immersa nella vasca da bagno con dei palloncini.

Il tema della maternità è espresso nella scultura in bronzo con funzione porta incensi, che mostra la nascita di due gemelli.