In 2017, Untitled, a 1982 painting depicting a black skull with red and yellow rivulets, sold for a record-breaking $110.5 million, becoming one of the most expensive paintings ever purchased.īiography Early life: 1960–1977 īasquiat was born on December 22, 1960, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York City, the second of four children to Matilde Basquiat (née Andrades, 1934–2008) and Gérard Basquiat (1930–2013). Since his death at the age of 27 in 1988, Basquiat's work has steadily increased in value. His visual poetics were acutely political and direct in their criticism of colonialism and support for class struggle. He used social commentary in his paintings as a tool for introspection and for identifying with his experiences in the black community, as well as attacks on power structures and systems of racism. He appropriated poetry, drawing, and painting, and married text and image, abstraction, figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his artwork in 1992.īasquiat's art focused on dichotomies such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. At 22, he was one of the youngest to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial in New York. At 21, Basquiat became the youngest artist to ever take part in Documenta in Kassel, Germany.

By the early 1980s, his paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. Jean-Michel Basquiat ( French: Decem– August 12, 1988) was an American artist who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement.īasquiat first achieved fame as part of the graffiti duo SAMO, alongside Al Diaz, writing enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of Manhattan's Lower East Side during the late 1970s, where rap, punk, and street art coalesced into early hip-hop music culture.

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