Julian Schnabel Elected Honorary Royal Academician

LONDON.- The Royal Academy of Arts announced that Cornelia Parker was elected a Royal Academician in the category of Sculpture at the General Assembly held in December 2009 and that Julian Schnabel was elected Honorary Royal Academician.

Cornelia Parker was born in Cheshire in 1956 and studied at Gloucestershire College of Art and Design (1974-75) as well as Wolverhampton Polytechnic (1975-78). She received her MFA from Reading University in 1982 and an honorary doctorate from the University of Wolverhampton in 2000.

She is perhaps best known for a number of large-scale installations including Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991), and The Maybe (1995), a collaboration with actress Tilda Swinton, at the Serpentine Gallery. In tandem with large projects like these she has also made an ongoing series of smaller works entitled Avoided Object, working in collaboration with numerous institutions including HM Customs & Excise, The Royal Armouries and Madame Tussauds. She has works in the Tate Collection and in numerous public and private collections in Europe and the USA.

Julian Schnabel was born in New York City in 1951. He attended the University of Houston from 1969-1973.

Schnabel’s paintings, sculptures and works on paper have been exhibited widely including: Tate, Whitechapel Gallery, Centre Georges Pompidou, Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art.

In 1996 he wrote and directed the feature film Basquiat . Schnabel’s second film, Before Night Falls, based on the life of the late exiled Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas, won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Colpa Volpi at the Venice Film Festival 2000. In 2007, Schnabel directed his third film, The Diving Bell and The Butterfly. He was awarded “Best Director” at the Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Globes.