JEAN MICHEL BASQUIAT AT GAGOSIAN GALLERY HONG KONG
May 21, 2013 - August 10, 2013
JEAN MICHEL
BASQUIAT AT GAGOSIAN GALLERY HONG KONG
May 21, 2013
- August 10, 2013
Gagosian
Gallery is pleased to announce the first exhibition in Hong Kong of paintings
by Jean-Michel Basquiat. An acclaimed exhibition at Gagosian New York earlier
this year drew tens of thousands of visitors, attesting to Basquiat’s acute
relevance twenty-five years after his untimely death. Born to a Haitian father
and a Puerto-Rican mother, Basquiat left his family home in Brooklyn, New York
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 and drawing, first on
salvaged materials then later on canvas and paper, and making bricolage with
materials scavenged from the urban environment. From the outset he worked
compulsively; his passion for words and music, his intense yet fluid energy,
and the heterogeneous materials that he employed so freely imbued his work with
urgency and excitement. 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. In that
photograph, Basquiat is a vision of cool,
sprawled in a
chair in an elegant three-piece suit and tie, with bunched dreadlocks and bare
feet, in front of a large, bold painting—a supernova in the making.
Charismatic
image aside, Basquiat was a prodigious young talent, fusing drawing and
painting with history and poetry to produce an unprecedented artistic language
and content that bridged cultures and enunciated alternative histories.
Combining materials and techniques with uninhibited yet knowing and precise
intent, his 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 harsh
realities of race, culture, and society. In explosively colored compositions,
forceful, schematic figures and menacing mask-like faces are inscribed against
fields jostling with images, signs, and symbols. The Thinker (1986), a wry, unsettled
riposte perhaps to Rodin's famous subject, depicts a strange, zombie-like
figüre surrounded by forms evoking clouds, birds, and musical instruments. The
canvas appears to have been primed and used as a drawing board for this
ambiguous imagery then mostly blacked-out, leaving few windows onto the
subject's thoughts. Whether the blank white space near the top of the
composition represents a future idea, mental clarity, or the sub-conscious
is left to
speculation. A double-portrait incorporating tribal markings, and strong, dark
reds and blues, and an afflictive, red-eyed self-portrait with delicate graphic
detailing painted in 1984, are further examples of this charged shorthand
approach, which Basquiat continued to develop and diversify until his tragic
premature death in 1988 at the age of twenty-seven— doubtlessly spurred by the
alienating effects of fame and addiction.
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, shot by Edo Bertoglio, and produced by Maripol in 1981, but
not released until 2000.
You may
reach Jean Michel Basquiat’s exhibition news at Gagosian Gallery to click
below links.
GAGOSIAN GALLERY
LARRY GAGOSIAN
GAGOSIAN GALLERY
'' I don't think about art while I work. I try to think
about life ''.
Jean Michel Basquiat
JEAN MICHEL BASQUIAT
