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Jean Michel Basquiat work on display at the Gagosian Gallery Feb 7th-April 6th

The Gagosian Gallery is featuring over fifty works both public and private collections of Jean Michel Basquiat. Born in Brooklyn he started his career as a graffiti artist.

Jean Michel Basquiat is my FAVORITE artist. I think I connect more with the thought process behind his pieces than any other artist, maybe a close second would be Keith Harring. The Gagosian Gallery is featuring over fifty works from both public and private collections of Jean Michel works.  Basquiat had a short but meteoric career which ended with his death at the young age of twenty-seven.

Born and raised in Brooklyn Jean Michel Basquiat started his artist career as a graffiti artist who would write messages in regards to social stances and always tagging them under the name SAMO which stood for “Same Old Shit”. When his friendship ended with Al Diaz so did “SAMO” Basquiat tagged the final message by saying “SAMO IS DEAD”. After this Basquiat focused on painting, but being that he was poor and often homeless he started painting on salvaged materials including doors,window frames etc. In 1981 Rene Ricard published “The Radiant Child” which instantly brought attention to Jean Michel and catapulted his career. This was the exposure he needed and it was unprecedented for a African-American artist, and an artist so young to be in such high demand.

If you are a New York resident or a visitor this is a show that you don’t want to miss. Below is a list of some of the pieces that are on display at the Gagosian Gallery February 7th-April 6th:

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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.

Directions:
555 West 24th Street
New York,NY 10011

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