Jean-Michel Basquiat

Fondation Louis Vuitton will bring together 120 defining works of Jean-Michel Basquiat that cover the artist’s whole career from 1980-1988. Installed across all four floors of Frank Gehry’s spectacular building, the exhibition includes many firsts. This exhibition will be an opportunity to see Basquiat clearly – as a great artist and a genius of draughtsmanship.

Basquiat’s exceptional trilogy Heads (1981-1983), will be presented together for the first time alongside several works by Basquiat and Warhol, including Dos Cabezas (1982), which marked the beginning of mutual fascination and collaboration between the artists.

The exhibition also includes works that have never been seen in Europe as well as paintings which have rarely been seen since their first presentations during the artist’s lifetime such as Offensive Orange (1982), Untitled (Boxer) (1982), Untitled (Tenant) (1982), Baptismal (1982) or Lye (1983).

For the curator Dieter Buchhart, “The exhibition follows his work, from the first drawings and monumental works to the later prints, collages and assemblages, shedding light on his inimitable touch, use of words, phrases and enumerations, and his recourse to concrete hip hop poetry. To the image of the African American man threatened by racism, exclusion, oppression and capitalism, he opposed warriors and heroes.”

At a young age, Jean-Michel Basquiat left school and made his first studio in the streets of New York. Very quickly, his painting achieved great success, which the artist both sought out and felt subjected to. His work refers back to the eruption of modernity, that of the expressionists, but his filiations are numerous. The acuteness of his gaze, his visits to museums, and the reading of a number of books gave him a real sense of culture. Yet this gaze was directed: the absence of black artists being painfully evident, the artist imposed the need to depict African and African American culture and revolts in equal measure in his work. Basquiat’s death in 1988 interrupted a very prolific body of work, carried out in under a decade, with over one thousand paintings and even more drawings.

This exhibition has been made possible through the collaboration of the Fondation Louis Vuitton and the Brant Foundation.

The show is curated by Dieter Buchhart with Suzanne Pagé, Artistic Director of the Fondation Louis Vuitton.