JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT AT GAGOSIAN GALLERY NEW YORK
February 7th – April 6th 2013
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT AT GAGOSIAN GALLERY NEW YORK
February 7th – April 6th 2013
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce a major
exhibition of works by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Featuring over fifty works from
public and private collections, the exhibition spans Basquiat’s brief but
meteoric career, which ended with his death at the age of twenty-seven. Thirty
years after Larry Gagosian first presented his work in Los Angeles, twenty
years after the first posthumous survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art
(1992–93), and eight years after the Brooklyn Museum of Art retrospective (2005),
viewers will have a fresh opportunity to consider Basquiat’s central role in
his artistic generation as a lightning rod and a bridge between cultures.
Basquiat left his family home in Brooklyn at the
age of fifteen and took to the streets. A voracious autodidact, he quickly
became a denizen of the explosive and decadent New York underground scene—a
noise musician who loved jazz, and a street poet who scrawled his sophisticated
aphorisms in Magic Marker across the walls of downtown Manhattan, copyrighting
them under the name SAMO. In 1981, he killed off this alter ego and began
painting, first on salvaged materials then later on canvas, and making
bricolage with materials scavenged from the urban environment. From the outset
he worked compulsively. He sold his first painting in 1981, and by 1982,
spurred by the Neo-Expressionist art boom, his work was in great demand. In
1985, he was featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in connection
with an article on the newly exuberant international art market. It was
unprecedented for an African-American artist, and for one so young. In that
photograph, Basquiat is a vision of cool, sprawled in a chair in front of one
of his bold paintings in an elegant three-piece suit and tie, with bunched
dreadlocks and bare feet.
Charismatic image aside, Basquiat was a unique and
prodigious artistic talent, fusing drawing and painting with history and poetry
to produce an artistic language and content that was entirely his own, and
which enunciated alternative histories, such as Discography (1982), Brothers
Sausage (1983), and Revised Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta
(1983). Combining the tools of graffiti (Magic Marker, spray enamel) with those
of fine art (oil and acrylic paint, collage, and oil stick), his best paintings
maintain a powerful tension between opposing aesthetic forces—expression and
knowledge, control and spontaneity, savagery and wit, urbanity and
primitivism—while providing acerbic commentary on the harsher realities of
race, culture, and society. In vividly colored canvases, forceful, schematic
figures and menacing, masklike faces are inscribed against fields jostling with
images, signs, symbols, and words used like brushstrokes. The frenetic, allover
quality of many of the large works suggests a drive towards a sort of
disjunctive mapping rather than the building of a classically unified
composition, where seemingly unrelated marks suddenly coalesce in syncopated
rhythms—like the best experimental jazz.
Basquiat’s iconography reflects the precocious
breadth of his inspirations and preoccupations—from classical poetry to human
anatomy, from sport to music, from politics to philosophy, from the arts of
Africa to Picasso, de Kooning, and Rauschenberg. Obnoxious Liberals (1982) and
Baby Boom (1982) suggest an angry bohemian’s pet peeves with contemporary
mores. There are pictographic crowns, favored by graffiti artists to confer
status, and warriors, whose significance is literal—as in the tributes to
African American boxing champions Cassius Clay (1982), Jersey Joe (1983)
Untitled (Sugar Ray Robinson) (1982)—or metaphorical—as in Warrior (1982) and
(Untitled) Julius Caesar on Gold (1981). Cars, cops, street games, and
skyscrapers reflect the hustle of the city in With Strings Two (1982), Untitled
(L.A. Painting) (1982), and Irony of a Negro Policeman (1981), while
Self-Portrait (1984) and The Thinker (1986) are more evidently self-referential
and introspective. The skull, a traditional motif of the vanitas, appeared very
early in Basquiat’s oeuvre and remained a constant obsession amidst a thick and
fast flow of subjects. Consider this when comparing the whimsical Bicycle Man
(1984) and Riding with Death (1988), painted just four years later: the man on
a bicycle in the earlier painting has been transformed into a naked figure
astride a skeletal horse in the later one—a somber, elegiac image with which
Basquiat the supernova, buckling under the alienating effects of fame and
addiction, ended his career and his life.
http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/jean-michel-basquiat--february-07-2013
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A
UNTITLED 1984
THE SCHORR FAMILY COLLECTION
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UNTITLED 1984
THE SCHORR FAMILY COLLECTION
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PER CAPITA 1983
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A
PER CAPITA 1981
APER CAPITA 1981
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THE NILE 1983
ATHE NILE 1983
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HOLLYWOOD AFRICANS 1983
HOLLYWOOD AFRICANS 1983
WHITNEY MUSEUM COLLECTION
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UNTITLED ( VENUS - THE GREAT CIRCLE ) 1983
SFMOMA COLLECTION
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UNTITLED 1984
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UNTITLED 1981
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THE DAROS SUITE OF THIRTY TWO DRAWINGS
THE DAROS SUITE OF THIRTY TWO DRAWINGS
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
1960-1988
Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in New York City in
1960, where he died in 1988. Major exhibitions include “Jean-Michel Basquiat:
Paintings 1981–1984,” Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (1984; traveled to Institute
of Contemporary Arts, London; and Museum
Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, through 1985); Kestnergesellschaft,
Hannover (1987, 1989); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1993; traveled
to Menil Collection, Houston; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; and Montgomery
Museum of Fine Art, Alabama, through 1994); “Basquiat,” Brooklyn Museum of Art,
New York (2005; traveled to Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,
through 2006); and Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland (2010; traveled to
Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris). Basquiat starred in Downtown 81, a
verité movie that was written by Glenn O’Brien and shot by Edo Bertoglio in
1981, but not released until 1998.
MY SUGGESTION
My suggestion
to read Jean Michel Basquiat’ s own web page and Brooklyn Museum’ s web page to have more
information and to see more paintings with more details on the paintings.
Brooklyn Museum’ s web page explains all the details knowledge on the paintings
when he had painted at that time with which idea of him. You may understand his
painting style, backround and individualty of him. I had some of painting
images from Brooklyn Museum’ s web page and book of museum latest resrospektive
exhibition for Jean Michel Basquiat. You may link to below web adress to reach
information. You may watch to video from Fondation Beyeler' s
exhibition of Jean Michel Basquiat .
