with Sperone Westwater, New York (as marked on the back).

Internationally renowned painter, sculptor and filmmaker, Julian Schnabel (born New York, 1951) stands out for his astonishing metamorphic ability and the overwhelming expressive power he communicates through his varied and heterogeneous production. In the world of cinema, he fascinates audiences and critics alike with films such as Basquiat in 1996, but it is in painting that his expressive potential reaches its peak, becoming the leading exponent of the internationalist neo-expressionist movement in the 1980s. Schnabel is famous for using an infinite range of materials as supports for his works, ranging from velvet to waxed canvas, from pieces of wood from all over the world to sails, photographs, carpets, tarpaulins and generally any flat surface that inspires his creative processes. One of the artist's most successful, and now iconographic, experiments involves nautical maps, of which the 2007 work presented here is a part.

The Navigation Drawings are works painted in oil on vintage nautical maps, an example of an inclusive art of things that are common and unusual at the same time. Schnabel mainly uses old Stanford maps, the ones that used to hang on rollers on the walls of classrooms, and chooses those depicting exotic places with sensational names, such as De Adra a Cabo de San Antonio y de Cabo Tres Forcas a Cabo IVI. By rotating the map to one side or turning it upside down, the artist unleashes its informative content; and his apparently random pictorial sign, which seems to move like a vortex, is actually precise and studied, and always refers back to the symbol of a cross. His palette is opaque and dominated by a reddish brown, which he himself refers to as the colour of dried blood. It is precisely to colour that Schnabel entrusts the task of conveying emotion and truth.