Jean-Michel Basquiat (Gagosian)

Solo show at Gagosian Gallery. 2013
Date: 7 February, 2013 until 6 April, 2013
Organiser: Gagosian Gallery

Major look at the painting output of Jean-Michel Basquiat, held at Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011, Thursday February 7 - Saturday April 6 2013.

From the Press Release, dated February 12, 2013:

“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 oif tweny-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’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.”

»  Jean-Michel Basquiat (Gagosian) fold-out

Poster relating to an exhibition, 2013