The antler paintings form a small but significant group which was painted directly after the earliest plate paintings. Schnabel was attracted to the antlers because of their thorn and veinlike shape, the beautiful material and the memory of death that hovers around them. These paintings, particularly Exile, 1980, and Prehistory: Glory, Honor, Privilege and Poverty, 1981, use the antlers not to disjoin the surface of the painting as the plates do but to add another distinct element of drawing to the composition. If cubism can be understood as the attempt to capture three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface, then Schnabel’s paintings seek to reverse that process
