The bold, multifaceted art of Julian Schnabel has arrived in Milan thanks to a show of 30 of the flamboyant American's paintings.
The works on display at the city's Rotonda della Befana centre trace Schnabel's career from 1978 up to the present day.
They give visitors a great opportunity to enjoy the output of an artist whose range goes from the wildly primitive, as in the case of works painted with his bare hands, to refined abstract pieces and stunning figurative pictures.
"Schnabel has not chosen one single form of expression to make himself easy to recognize and, therefore, easy to sell. He wanted to be the expression of the many personalities that are inside him," said City of Milan Culture Councillor Vittorio Sgarbi at the exhibition's inauguration.
The artist explained that: "I use any tool that enables me to translate my impulses into physical forms".
"When I paint no one can imagine what I'm doing, not even me," the 55-year-old added.
"I always make one thing to discover another."
The show kicks off with three massive abstract works - six metres by six meters.
These are followed by a series of vibrant portraits of friends, celebrities and the artist himself, all created in the 1990s.
They include a painting of British actor Gary Oldman, who played a character based on Schnabel in the 1996 biopic the artist directed about his friend and fellow Neo-expressionist painter Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Oldman is depicted in the costume of a matador, a sign of Schnabel's passion for Spain.
There is also a series of tributes to Jane Birkin, the British actress and singer who starred in many French-language films in the 1970s and 80s, as well as some of Schnabel's Velasquez-style self-portraits.
The third section is devoted to Schnabel's celebrated plate paintings - signature works which use a base surface of broken crockery to create some surprising visual effects.
The final part of the show is devoted to his so-called Japanese paintings.
These seductive works range from the figurative to the abstract and bring Schnabel's light side to the fore.
Schnabel said his works may be varied but they are united in carrying a common message.
"My paintings are always expressions of peace for the children of many parts of the world who cannot see a painting of any sort," he said.
The artist was born in 1951 in New York but grew up in Texas, gaining a degree from the University of Houston.
Drawn to art at an early age, he had his first solo show at Houston's Contemporary Art Museum at the age of 24.
Schnabel was strongly influenced by the likes of Cy Twombly, Joseph Beuys and Antoni Gaudi and by the mid-1980s had become a leading figure in the Neo-expressionist movement.
In 1996, he tried his hand at directing with the film about Basquiat, the Brooklyn-born artist who started out as a graffiti writer and died of a drug overdose in 1988 at the age of 28.
Schnabel returned to filmmaking in 2000 with Before Night Falls based on the autobiography of Cuban poet and writer Reinaldo Arenas.
The film was an international hit and earned Spanish actor Javier Bardem an Oscar nomination.
