16 February 2015

Welcome to our Blog on Jean-Michel Basquiat

16 February 2015
I am so excited to share this blog with whoever reads our bi-monthly offerings. Over the family day weekend I took the opportunity to attend the Jean- Michel Basquiat exhibit at the AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario) and I must say that it was one of the most moving and relevant exhibits that I have ever had the pleasure of attending. First of I should start by providing some background on the artist himself.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was an American artist, musician and producer. Basquiat first achieved notoriety as part of SAMO, an informal graffiti group who wrote enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City during the late 1970s where the hip hop, post-punk and street art movements had coalesced. By the 1980s he was exhibiting his Neo-expressionist and Primitivist paintings in galleries and museums internationally. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his art in 1992.

Incredibly 35 years later Jean-Michel Basquiat still speaks to the social, political and economic climate as it did when his art was first introduced to main stream culture. To me this is the evidence of a truly great artist. Work which touches the very fabric of who we are as a species. Basquiat used social commentary in his paintings as a “springboard to deeper truths about the individual”, as well as attacks on power structures and systems of racism, while his poetics were acutely political and direct in their criticism of colonialism and support for class struggle.

Use what you got comes to mind when viewing some of this gifted artists work as he would literally paint on discarded wooden materials he would find in the street and turn them into master pieces taking inspiration from books and television and music and social commentary. Basquiat’s art focused on “suggestive dichotomies,” such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. He appropriated poetry, drawing and painting, and married text and image, abstraction and figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique.

Recently his works have sold for as much as 50 million dollars at auctions around the world and he has been displayed at the most important art galleries internationally and his pieces hang in some of the most important private collections in the world. All of this in 27 short years. Jean-Michel Basquiat has been called one of if not the most important artists of the 21th century and after seeing his works up close I can see why. His work made sense and his pieces speak to the viewer. You don’t have to be an art lover to appreciate what he left behind. His genius speaks volumes to us about who we are. The good, the bad and the ugly. If you get a chance this is an exhibit that will give you a bit more insight as to who we are as a culture and as a society at least it did for me.

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.
John F. Kennedy

Nexonta Technologies Inc.