Domingo Zapata-s Best-Known Work May Be Himself
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/fashion/domingo-zapatas-best-known-work-may-be-himself.html?hpw&_r=0
Some artists shun the spotlight, letting galleries promote
their work while they keep to their studios. Others are savvier, stoking just
enough buzz to get the art cognoscenti’s attention.
And then there is Domingo Zapata, a 38-year-old Spanish
artist who counts Leonardo DiCaprio and George Soros as clients, parties with
Lindsay Lohan and Scarlett Johansson, and appears regularly in the pages of The
New York Post, which has called him the “next Andy Warhol.”
During Art Basel
Miami Beach in December, for example, Mr. Zapata held a party at the SLS Hotel.
He invited more than 2,000 guests, including Lance Bass (’N Sync) and Jill
Zarin (“The Real Housewives of New York City”), and sold his fiberglass tiger
sculptures to the former football player Jeremy Shockey and other art-struck
buyers for upward of $100,000 each. A media release sent out on his behalf
proclaimed it “the biggest and hottest party of Art Basel 2012.”
Yet, for all his P.R.
efforts, Mr. Zapata has not exactly been embraced by the serious New York art world.
“I don’t know who he
is,” said Zach Feuer, the Chelsea
gallery owner known for cultivating young artists, when asked about Mr.
Zapata’s work. That reaction was echoed by other gallerists along the Chelsea art corridor.
Moreover, Mr.
Zapata’s name is absent from the pages of ARTnews, the 111-year-old magazine
that chronicles the comings and goings of the art world. “He’s linked to the
fashion world a little, right?” asked Barbara MacAdam, the magazine’s deputy
editor.
When told that some
tabloids have called Mr. Zapata the next Warhol, Ms. MacAdam was unmoved. “How
many next Andy Warhols are there?” she asked. “Hundreds of thousands. Everybody
is the next Andy Warhol.”
But Mr. Zapata is too
confident of his own artistic ambitions to let the art elite stand in his way.
He recently hired Paul Wilmot Communications, a public relations agency
specializing in fashion, to help him “get to the next level,” he said, and get
his work noticed by museums like the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art.
“Of course, people
want to know about a painter who is compared to Andy Warhol in his lifestyle,”
Mr. Zapata said. “My life is a tabloid target.”
ON A RECENT NIGHT,
Mr. Zapata stood in his penthouse suite atop the Bowery Hotel in the East Village,
with its sweeping views of the city and big, comfortable furniture. Half the
space is used as a studio, although he also paints on the couch, the walls, the
headboard of his bed, even on his French bulldog, Gordo.
Smoking an e-cigarette,
he explained why he started painting flowers based on the doodles of his
toddler sons. “Art is about expressing feelings and passion and love,” he said,
without a trace of irony. “How can you find the most pure state of that? Only
in the soul of a child, because it’s not contaminated.”
He took a
contemplative drag. “So I asked them, ‘Can you paint some flowers for me?’ And
I tried to copy them.”
Mr. Zapata had just
returned from a three-week trip to Europe, to see his art dealer in London, discuss a possible commission of gladiator
paintings in Rome and attend meetings in Paris, where he said he
maintains a daily ritual: “I wake up and I go to the Louvre and I see ‘Mona
Lisa.’ I say, ‘Good morning,’ and then I leave.”
Short and stocky, with
a broad, bearded face and shaggy brown hair, Mr. Zapata looks and talks like an
artist out of “Zoolander.” His skin is often flecked with paint, as if
advertising his artistic dedication. His arm is tattooed with an image of a
woman he saw at a Parisian cafe. For a time, he kept a studio at the Chateau
Marmont in Los Angeles, and, like Picasso, he
barters his artwork for meals at restaurants like Cipriani Downtown in New York.
Even his name, spoken
by his admirers with a three-syllable trip of the tongue (“doh-MING-go!”)
provides maximum pop.
Born on Majorca, Mr. Zapata is from “a very humble family,” he
said, and growing up he helped mix colors at the auto shop where his father
painted cars. “I was always painting,” he said. “When I was 10, I did a mural
at my school. I was obsessed with it.”
He studied art in London before moving to New York in 1999, where, following his
father’s advice, he took a day job on Wall Street. Mr. Zapata also worked
briefly in the music industry as chairman of IMC Records, a Spanish-language
label (he co-wrote lyrics to an updated version of Los Del Rio’s 1996 hit,
“Macarena”).
But an investment in
udate.com, an online dating site that was bought by Barry Diller’s company in
2002, earned him a $300,000 windfall, he said, and allowed him to paint full
time.
“It’s the only thing
I ever wanted to do,” Mr. Zapata said. “You only have one life, so you better
be what you want to be.”
Exactly how he went
from a fledging painter to a “celebrity artist du jour,” as his Web site
describes him, remains a bit sketchy. And Mr. Zapata tends to gloss over his
apprentice years, preferring to name-drop celebrity friends or share
titillating stories, like when he said he painted a naked female subject and
stripped down in solidarity.
Enlarge This Image
From what can be puzzled together, Mr. Zapata met a wealthy
contractor and polo enthusiast named Michael Borrico, who liked his paintings
of polo horses. In 2004, a private show was held at Mr. Borrico’s home, where
Mr. Soros and other guests were similarly struck.
“I could have been
painting fish tanks and I would still be in a dump somewhere,” Mr. Zapata said.
“But I decided to do polo horses. That’s where my life changed.”Philip Rebeiz,
whose HUS Gallery in London represents Mr. Zapata, said that the artist’s “panache”
and subject matter — symbols of virility like horses and semi-naked women that
have a LeRoy Neiman aesthetic — appeal to power-broker types like Mr. Soros and
the National Basketball Association executive Pat Riley.
“Domingo brings a lot
of ‘wow,’ ” Mr. Rebeiz said, adding that Mr. Zapata’s work sells for $50,000 to
$195,000. “People almost spend money on his paintings just to be around him.”
“We have a lot of
financiers who love the matador series,” he added. “Saudis love the polo
horses.”
For his part, Mr.
Zapata seems to devote as much attention to cultivating celebrity friendships
as to his art. Beautiful actresses in particular seem charmed by his romantic
outlook. He is friendly enough with Ms. Lohan (they met through a mutual friend
in California)
to have lent her his Porsche. Mr. Zapata became tabloid fodder after a man
accused Ms. Lohan of clipping him with the car outside a Chelsea nightclub.
In late 2011, Mr.
Zapata took Polaroids of Ms. Lohan wearing a thigh-baring dress and then
scribbled on the prints, selling the graffitied images to a collector for
$100,000. The work is part of his ongoing series “Ten,” for which Alexandra
Richards, Michelle Rodriguez, Kim Kardashian and Sofia Vergara have all
modeled.
Mr. Zapata said he planned
to capture 10 “iconic women of our time,” although his description of the
project sounded more like a seduction strategy recommended by Penthouse. He
painted Ms. Vergara spur-of-the-moment at her house in Los Angeles, he said, using her semi-naked body
as a canvas and then photographing the results.
Mr. Zapata, who is
separated from his wife (she lives in upstate New York with the couple’s two sons), said
he never wants the project to end. “A woman is a mother of creation,” he said,
turning philosophical. “Without creation, we don’t exist. Therefore, I find
women extremely important and caring and loving, you know?”
MR. ZAPATA SPENDS up
to 14 hours a day painting, then makes his social rounds several nights a week.
“I love New York City
night life,” he said, ticking off his favorite clubs, like Electric Room and
Provocateur.
Back at his Bowery
penthouse, he poured himself a whiskey, in anticipation of going out. His
friend, Malini Murjani, a handbag designer and the daughter of the Indian textile
magnate Mohan Murjani, soon arrived, bringing with her a Hong Kong-based
clothing manufacturer who was interested in buying art. Mr. Zapata gave the man
a studio tour and spoke of the uncontaminated souls of children.
Then everyone rode
the elevator downstairs and took a chauffeured SUV to Cipriani Downtown, where
one of Mr. Zapata’s large bullfighter paintings hangs above the bar.
Dressed in a black
Fuddruckers T-shirt and jeans, Mr. Zapata was joined for dinner by his studio
manager, a Brazilian former model named Cinthia, and his friend Paolo Zampolli,
the former owner of ID models and perennial bon vivant. After dinner, during
which Mr. Zapata showed off his new BlackBerry 10 and announced that he was
“ready to make more babies,” the night progressed to Provocateur, where the
velvet rope parted for the artist and his entourage.
“Domingo! Domingo!”
several people shouted above the music. One of them, Arty Dozortsev, an
enthusiastic, fast-talking liquor distributor, warmly greeted the painter.
Mr. Zapata may still
be unknown to the fine art crowd, but if it were up to the liquor distributor,
his paintings would already be hanging in MoMA, alongside Warhol and other
contemporary masters.
“Domingo is the
best,” Mr. Dozortsev said, wrapping his arm around the grinning artist. “This
guy is the next Basquiat.”
Domingo Zapata
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domingo_Zapata
photos
http://www.google.hr/search?q=domingo+zapata&client=opera&hs=Uxh&channel=suggest&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=VGB6UZOzI7PP4QTs6AE&ved=0CCwQsAQ&biw=1024&bih=651
He is the celebrity artist du jour. His work sells for
six-figure sums and he currently has a waiting list of around 30 commissions
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-2286564/Domingo-Zapata-Johnny-Depp-Leo-DiCaprio-buy-art-Lindsay-Lohan-crashed-car-stars-want-paint--naked.html
Depp and DiCaprio buy his art, Lindsay Lohan crashed his car
and Hollywood beauties want him to paint them
- naked: The wild world of Domingo Zapata