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It’s about 80% anger.
—Jean-Michel Basquiat

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce a major exhibition of works by Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Featuring over fifty works from public and private collections, the exhibition spans Basquiat’s brief but meteoric career, which ended with his death at the age of twenty-seven. Thirty years after Larry Gagosian first presented his work in Los Angeles, twenty years after the first posthumous survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1992–93), and eight years after the Brooklyn Museum of Art retrospective (2005), viewers will have a fresh opportunity to consider Basquiat’s central role in his artistic generation as a lightning rod and a bridge between cultures.

Basquiat left his family home in Brooklyn at the age of fifteen and took to the streets. A voracious autodidact, he quickly became a denizen of the explosive and decadent New York underground scene—a noise musician who loved jazz, and a street poet who scrawled his sophisticated aphorisms in Magic Marker across the walls of downtown Manhattan, copyrighting them under the name SAMO. In 1981, he killed off this alter ego and began painting, first on salvaged materials then later on canvas, and making bricolage with materials scavenged from the urban environment. From the outset he worked compulsively. He sold his first painting in 1981, and by 1982, spurred by the Neo-Expressionist art boom, his work was in great demand. In 1985, he was featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in connection with an article on the newly exuberant international art market. It was unprecedented for an African-American artist, and for one so young. In that photograph, Basquiat is a vision of cool, sprawled in a chair in front of one of his bold paintings in an elegant three-piece suit and tie, with bunched dreadlocks and bare feet.

Sophia Heriveaux and Roger Guenveur Smith on Jean-Michel Basquiat

In Conversation
Sophia Heriveaux and Roger Guenveur Smith on Jean-Michel Basquiat

Join Gagosian for a conversation between director, producer, and writer Sophia Heriveaux and actor, director, and writer Roger Guenveur Smith inside the exhibition Jean-Michel Basquiat: Made on Market Street, at Gagosian, Beverly Hills. Heriveaux and Guenveur Smith both share a personal connection to Basquiat: Heriveaux is the artist’s niece and Guenveur Smith was one of his friends and collaborators. The pair discuss Basquiat’s work and legacy, as well as his lasting impact on contemporary art and culture.

Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2024

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2024

The Spring 2024 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available with a fresh cover design featuring Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Lead Plate with Hole (1984).

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Los Angeles

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Los Angeles

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, met with filmmaker Tamra Davis, art dealer Larry Gagosian, and author and curator Fred Hoffman to reflect on their experiences with the artist during the 1980s in Los Angeles.

Private Pages Made Public

Book Corner
Private Pages Made Public

Megan N. Liberty explores artists’ engagement with notebooks and diaries, thinking through the various meanings that arise when these private ledgers become public.

Visions of the Self: Jenny Saville on Rembrandt

Visions of the Self: Jenny Saville on Rembrandt

Jenny Saville reveals the process behind her new self-portrait, painted in response to Rembrandt’s masterpiece Self-Portrait with Two Circles.

Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2019

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2019

The Spring 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Red Pot with Lute Player #2 by Jonas Wood on its cover.

Jean-Michel in Black and White

Spotlight
Jean-Michel in Black and White

Fred Hoffman looks back on the creation of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Tuxedo (1983), examining the work’s significance in relation to identity and the hip-hop culture of the 1980s.

Basquiat

Spotlight
Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (L.A. Painting) (1982) was a game changer. Text by Derek Blasberg.

Jean-Michel Basquiat poster featuring the artwork "Flexible"

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Made on Market Street

$35
Cover of the book Jean-Michel Basquiat: Made on Market Street with a dust jacket

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Made on Market Street

$100
Cover of the Gagosian Quarterly: Spring 2024 Issue featuring artwork by Jean-Michel Basquiat

Gagosian Quarterly: Spring 2024 Issue

$20
Jean-Michel Basquiat 1986 poster

Jean-Michel Basquiat

$250
Front of Jean-Michel Basquiat: Beat Bop T-shirt

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Beat Bop T-shirt

$85
Front cover of the book Basquiat × Warhol: Painting Four Hands with bellyband

Basquiat × Warhol: Painting Four Hands

$70
Cover of the book Basquiat: The Modena Paintings

Basquiat: The Modena Paintings

$50
Front of Jean-Michel Basquiat: Charles the First Jigsaw Puzzle box

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Charles the First Jigsaw Puzzle

$48
Front of slipcase for the book Basquiat: Pollo Frito: Street to Studio

Basquiat: Pollo Frito: Street to Studio

$100