Julian Schnabel, who shot to fame with his smashed-plate paintings in the early 1980s, and then found success as a director with films such as Basquiat, Before Night Falls, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, is often agitated. The Brooklyn-born 71-year-old is constantly rearranging the environment around him, making sure it is just so. Bouquet of Mistakes, his arresting new collection of velvet paintings, reflects the artist’s attention to detail. “It took me two years to do these paintings,” Schnabel has said. Per Pace Gallery, the exhibition “considers the ways that the material appears as subject matter throughout the history of art … and its symbolic weight in the history of humanity itself.” —Arwa Mahdawi