The artist's most inspired works in one volume.
Jean-Michel Basquiat--artist and art world provocateur--took New York
City by storm with his powerful and complex works that relentlessly
engaged with charged sociopolitical issues, including race, police
brutality, and structural inequity. In this important volume, devoted to
an exhibition at the Brant Foundation in their newly opened Manhattan
outpost featuring the artist's key works, Basquiat's art returns to its
East Village roots, contextualized for the first time in decades in the
very neighborhood that served as one of his greatest inspirations.
Dieter Buchhart, noted Basquiat scholar and curator, brings together one
hundred of the artist's most important works, focusing on the best
examples of the many subjects that informed Basquiat's work, from jazz,
anatomy, sports figures, comics, classical literature, the African
diaspora, and art history. The exhibition partially restages three of
the artist's critical early shows, including an exhibition of the
artist's paintings and drawings of heads at Robert Miller Gallery; his
most important canvases from Gagosian Gallery's 1982 show in Los
Angeles; and Basquiat's solo show at Fun Gallery in the East Village.
Buchhart also considers in-depth the artist's so-called stretcher bar
paintings, in which the normally hidden wooden supports for stretched
canvases are exposed, works that have yet to be explored at length by
scholars. In so doing, Buchhart offers a critical assessment of the
enduring importance and legacy of the artist's work.
