#50 Cy Schnabel

“If I was going to open a gallery, it needed to have a very personal identity.” I met Cy Schnabel at Villa Magdalena in Madrid during Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend to record a conversation for The Art Bystander podcast.

Born in New York in 1993 to Julian Schnabel and Basque designer Olatz López Garmendia, Cy grew up around artists, filmmakers and musicians, with access to his father’s studio from childhood. He studied political science at Bard, imagining a future in journalism, before moving to Mexico City and discovering exhibition-making through the Centro Cultural de España en México.

“I just discovered that curating was a storytelling medium.”

Villa Magdalena opened in 2020 in Julian’s former studio at the family home on Monte Igueldo in San Sebastián. The setting was personal: summers spent surfing with his twin brother, his mother’s Basque heritage, and his work on the archive of his uncle, Alejandro Garmendia, whose estate remains central to the gallery.

Madrid followed in June 2025. Opposite San Nicolás, away from the city’s established gallery concentrations, Cy found a space whose history appealed to him, with timber beams concealed beneath plaster. The move gave his artists greater visibility and a permanent base in a city he sees as an essential connection between Europe and Latin America.

His programme returns to narrative painting, symbolic figuration and the ways mythology and folklore survive in images. He writes the texts and curates the exhibitions himself, working with emerging artists alongside older practices that deserve renewed attention.

There is a practical responsibility behind that commitment. Artists need sales, and developing an audience for a body of work can take several exhibitions. “I’m running a business,” he says.

We spoke about the privileges and assumptions attached to the Schnabel name, his admiration for his father’s painting, and the years of attention an artist’s work requires. His response to questions of inheritance is an invitation to look at what he has made: “People can judge me based on my work.”

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.