Who is Jean-Michel Basquiat?

Jean-Michel Basquiat (French: [ʒɑ̃ miʃɛl baskja]; December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was an American artist. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he rose to completion during the 1980s as ration of the Neo-expressionism movement.

Basquiat first achieved fame as portion of SAMO, a graffiti duo who wrote enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the late 1970s, where rap, punk, and street art coalesced into prematurely hip-hop music culture. By the in advance 1980s, his paintings were visceral exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. At 21, Basquiat became the youngest artist to ever accept part in documenta in Kassel. At 22, he was the youngest to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial in New York. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his art undertaking in 1992.

Basquiat’s art focused upon dichotomies such as large quantity versus poverty, integration hostile to segregation, and inner alongside outer experience. He appropriated poetry, drawing, and painting, and married text and image, abstraction, figuration, and historical information polluted with contemporary critique. He used social commentary in his paintings as a tool for introspection and for identifying in the same way as his experiences in the Black community of his time, as skillfully as attacks on power structures and systems of racism. His visual poetics were acutely diplomatic and deliver in their criticism of colonialism and sustain for class struggle.

Since Basquiat’s death at the age of 27 from a heroin overdose in 1988, his bill has steadily increased in value. At a Sotheby’s auction in May 2017, Untitled, a 1982 painting by Basquiat depicting a black skull later red and ocher rivulets, sold for $110.5 million, becoming one of the most expensive paintings ever purchased. It then set a extra record tall for an American performer at auction.