Three years later, at the age of 27, he was found dead from a heroin overdose in the attic. The artist Jean-Michel Basquiat was found to have died in the East Village apartment on August 12, 1988 when he was only 27 years old because friends said he had overdose of heroin.
After he burst onto the art scene in 1981, his paintings of distressed figures were hailed as work of genius by some critics, he sold his first painting in 1981 and 1982, fueled by the boom of neoexpressionism, and his work was in great demand, in 1985 he appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine in conjunction with an article about the booming international art market.
In June 1980, he presented for the first time at the Times Square Show a groundbreaking exhibition held at a private massage parlor on Seventh Avenue in a private space surrounded by painting, graffiti and performance art. The participating artists, including Kenny Scharf, David Hammons and Jenny Holzer, were united by style, not so much by the experience of living in the 1970s economic crisis in New York City.
In the late 1970s, this work began to gain attention in the art world – like the work of other graffiti artists – as did Basquiat – 20 of his works were shown at P.S. New York / New Wave exhibition.
According to art critic Franklin Searmans, Basquiat appropriated poetry, drawing and painting and combined text and image, abstraction, figure and historical information with contemporary criticism. Basquiat used this technique and chose the freedom that graffiti artists who painted in the New York subway in the 1970s and 1980s enjoyed – and still enjoy today – to create large paintings and mobile designs that could be exhibited in galleries and museums and purchased by collectors.
After becoming a member of Upper West Side drama group Family Life Theatre, he developed the character SAMO (an abbreviation for “Same Old Shit”), a man who tried to sell false religion to the public.
Basquiat’s work focuses on the history of black art, music and poetry as well as the religious and everyday traditions of black life. Basquiat is widely known in the United States, but less well known in the UK. In May one of his paintings (Untitled (Los Angeles Painting ), 1982) was sold for $ 110.5 million (£ 85 million ), the highest estimated percentage of the entire history.
Basquiat made the streets of Lower Manhattan his studio – radical in his artistic practice and his life – and joined the creative impulse that began in New York in the late 1970s and 1980s and shows Basquiat his work back to the area that inspired him – for the first time in decades – illustrating his prolific but short-lived career and a wide range of topics, most notably his keen observation of his contemporary world – especially.
Jean-Michel Basquiat (born December 22, 1960, Brooklyn, New York – August 12, 1988, New York) is an American painter who became an underground graffiti artist in 1988 who earned many thousands of dollars for his canvases.
Basquiat’s paintings focused on “suggestive dichotomies” such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation and inner experience versus outer experience and mixed text and image, abstraction, figure and historical information mixed with contemporary criticism. Basquiat used social commentary in his paintings as a “stepping stone to deeper truths about personality” as well as attacks on power structures and systems of racism, while his poetics were sharply political and direct in criticizing colonialism and supporting class struggle…
Whether as a poet or an artist, there are a lot of text in his paintings, directly mentioning racism, slavery, people and street scenes, black historical figures, famous musicians and athletes in New York in the 1980s, as well as his notebooks and Many important drawings. Basquiat cleverly redesigned a strategy of appropriating pop art to create works that sometimes praise black culture and history but also expose its complexity and contradictions.
Neo-Expressionism marked the return of painting and the revival of the human figure in contemporary art. Images of the African diaspora and classical America dotted Basquiat’s work during this period (Basquiat was later represented in Los Angeles by art dealer and gallery owner Larry Gagosian ). He has opened six solo exhibitions in cities around the world and is the youngest artist ever to be featured on Documenta, a prestigious international contemporary art exhibition held in 2005.
Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in 1960 in Brooklyn, Haitian and Puerto Ricans; as a teenager he left his home in Lower Manhattan to play in a noise group, painted and earned his living from doing odd jobs ; he and Al Diaz became famous for their graffiti in the late 1970s, a series of cryptic statements such as “Playing Art with Dad’s Money” and “Clone 9 to 5” with the words “SAMO” in it.
