Toronto art gallery hosts limited-run exhibition of late NYC artist
In his 2013 song “Picasso Baby,” rapper Jay-Z boasts of having a “Yellow Basquiat in his kitchen corner.” Such is the enduring influence of the late New York artist’s work that 25 years after his death, he is still name-dropped in rap songs, his imprint on popular culture remaining as strong as ever. Until May 10, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto will host the limited-run exhibition Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now’s the Time, featuring a selection of 85 of the artist’s works from galleries throughout Europe and the United States.
Born in Brooklyn in 1960 to a Haitian father and Puerto-Rican mother, Jean-Michel Basquiat first came to the art world’s attention as part of the burgeoning graffiti movement of the late 1970s with his SAMO tags around New York City (short for “Samo Shit”). During the early-to-mid 1980s, Basquiat would become the poster-boy for “Neo-Expressionism,” a vivid and emotive style of painting that was a la mode in the art world at the time. Basquiat moved onto selling works for millions, collaborating with the likes of Andy Warhol, and, for a brief time, even dating Madonna. Experiencing difficulty in the wake of his newfound fame, Basquiat subsequently struggled with drug problems and passed away from an overdose in 1988, bringing a premature end to a short but highly inspired artistic career.
The exhibit at the AGO guides gallery goers through the chronology of Basquiat’s output during the 1980s. In early rooms, there are works like Skull (1981), which first made Basquiat a star on the art scene, where an emaciated head is brought to life with expressive painterly colour and scrawled-on lines and geometric shapes. Midway through the exhibit, there is a wall devoted to the mid-80s Warhol collaborations, with paintings like Win $1,000,000 (1984) where a Basquian African bust competes for space with a series of appropriated slogans from the famous pop artist. Before the gift shop exit, we are even treated to works like Eroica (1987), a sprawling canvas of drawings, lists, and splotched-on paint with the titular phrase written repeatedly in the right-hand corner, signalling the move towards abstraction Basquiat was starting to make in his final years.
In this modern climate of internet inundation and Ferguson unrest, Basquiat’s work, with its themes of information overload and racial tension, remains as topical as ever. Outside of their immediate relation to the contemporary situation, however, the works collected in the exhibit are – simply put – electrifying, and charged with that intangible manic energy which so characterizes truly great art. Indeed, if one is to go to one art exhibit this year, may it be this one. As the name of the show reads, now’s the time.