Marty Schnapf: Apparitions

Marty Schnapf: Apparitions

November 16, 2024 – January 4, 2025

Opening reception: Saturday, November 16, from 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Diane Rosenstein Gallery announces Apparitions,a solo exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based multimedia artist Marty Schnapf. Since 2019, Schnapf has developed a unique visual language with deconstructed compositions anchored in the figure and the natural world. Created in his Chinatown studio, these mostly large-scale paintings foreground figures in elaborately articulated pastoral landscapes and vibrant architectural interiors. This is Marty Schnapf's third solo exhibition with our gallery.

Schnapf’s paintings evoke sensual and psychological space: figures overlap, or a single figure assumes various irreconcilable positions. Apparitions continues an ongoing body of work of emotionally complex tableaus which explore the fluid interplay between the physical and psychological dimensions of human connection, isolation, and independence. 

This artist describes his painting practice as a way to communicate with people closelyand enter into empathic relationships. “I think of apparitions as an externalization of the innumerable selves we carry within. In much of my work over the last few years I have considered the aspect of these selves that represent our past and future potential. Here, I'm more focused on the arrival of a being that is at once of us and at the same time wholly apart from anything we understand about ourselves.”

Marty Schnapf works in a variety of visual and time-based disciplines, but in recent years has focused on his “foundation” in painting and drawing. Having spent several years developing performance-based installations and events, his investigations in these mediums, particularly dance, continue to inform his work today. Cognizant of the audience’s role in the activation of meaning, he builds multi-layered works that unfold slowly, rewarding prolonged viewing with ever-changing revelations. Schnapf regards his paintings as time-based works. He believes, “there is no better avenue by which to approach the inconstant emotional and psychological space experienced in dream, desire, memory, and premonition.” 

Born in Indiana, Marty Schnapf (USA, b. 1977) earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Wittenburg University in 1999, specializing in Painting, Printmaking, and Sculpture. Hehas received solo exhibitions with Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles; PERROTIN, Shanghai; Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles; UNIT LONDON and Alice Black Gallery, both in London, UK. He was a recent artist-in-residence at XENIA Creative Retreat, Hampshire, UK (2023). Schnapf’s paintings have been included in group exhibitions with Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles (2024); GAVLAK Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); PLATFORM (in partnership with David Zwirner Gallery, 2022); and A.MORE, Milan, IT, among others. In Taiwan, he installed a public sculpture at the Soulangh Cultural Park in Tainan City (2018); and he received the 2016 Rema Hort Mann Foundation ACE Grant for “Night Fever,” a sculptural installation in downtown Los Angeles. The artist lives in Highland Park, CA, with his partner, the sculptor Cammie Staros.