Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist who rose to prominence in the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement. He first gained notoriety as a graffiti artist in New York City before transitioning to the gallery scene and becoming one of the youngest artists to exhibit at major art events.

Basquiat started out as a graffiti artist, writing enigmatic epigrams around Manhattan. By the early 1980s, his paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally, featuring a unique blend of text, imagery, abstraction, and social commentary.

Basquiat’s art often explored themes of wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. He used social commentary as a tool for introspection and identifying with his experiences as a member of the black community, as well as for attacking power structures and systems of racism.

At the age of 21, Basquiat became the youngest artist to ever take part in Documenta in Kassel, Germany. At 22, he became one of the youngest to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial in New York. The Whitney Museum of American Art later held a retrospective of his artwork in 1992.

Since Basquiat’s death at the age of 27 in 1988, his work has steadily increased in value. In 2017, one of his paintings titled ‘Untitled’ sold for a record-breaking $110.5 million, making it one of the most expensive paintings ever purchased.

In the late 1970s, Basquiat first gained notoriety as part of the graffiti duo SAMO, alongside Al Diaz, writing enigmatic epigrams all over Manhattan, particularly in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side where rap, punk, and street art coalesced into early hip-hop culture.

Basquiat appropriated poetry, drawing, and painting, and married text and image, abstraction, figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique in his artwork. His style and influences evolved from his early graffiti work to a more refined and conceptual approach in the gallery setting.