Jean-Michel Basquiat

That same year, Basquiat met Fred Hoffman, who was running New City Editions, and together they would produce six editioned prints, including Tuxedo (1982) and Untitled (1983), large-scale silkscreen works on canvas. Featuring white text, sketches, and directional arrows on a black ground, Tuxedo contrasts with Basquiat’s intensely colorful paintings of the era, its dense collection of allusive phrases ascending to the crown at its top.

For Basquiat, working in Venice offered a reprieve from the distractions and pressures of the New York art scene. Many of the paintings he produced in Venice were shown at his next Los Angeles exhibition, which opened on March 8, 1983, at Larry Gagosian Gallery and presented approximately thirty paintings, including Hollywood Africans, Horn Players, Museum Security (Hollywood Meltdown), Luna Park, Untitled, and Year of the Boar (all 1983). Made on Market Street will present many of these pivotal works together again for the first time.

A highlight of the exhibition is Hollywood Africans, a work that portrays Basquiat alongside fellow artists Toxic and Rammellzee as new Black celebrities in a palette that evokes the bright Southern California sun. Fusing drawing, painting, and text across three panels, Horn Players pays homage to jazz greats Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Underscoring the importance of music to Basquiat, it conveys the vitality of bebop in a visual style informed by contemporary graffiti and hip-hop. The same year it was painted, Basquiat would produce the influential hip-hop track “Beat Bop” on his own Tartown Record label, featuring Rammellzee and K-Rob.

In the summer of 1983, Basquiat was drawn back to Los Angeles. He returned to Market Street, this time establishing his own studio a few doors down and remaining there until late in the spring of 1984. One night, while Basquiat was working, he went outside to a fenced-in courtyard just behind the studio, where he encountered an unhoused person sleeping. After this incident the courtyard’s fence was removed, but instead of disposing of the wooden slats Basquiat integrated them as supports for some of his most iconic paintings—Flexible, Gold Griot, and M (all 1984), all of which will be exhibited as a group in Made on Market Street for the first time since they were created. With Flexible, Basquiat expanded his portrayal of the Black male, presenting a larger-than-life figure whose elastic, expressive arm gesture combines the artist’s interests in anatomy, symbolism, and qualities he characterized as “royalty, heroism, and the streets.”

Made on Market Street is accompanied by a catalogue that reproduces the exhibited works together with archival material, including installation images from the 1982 and 1983 exhibitions at Larry Gagosian Gallery, historical ephemera, and exhibition reviews, as well as previously unpublished photographs of Basquiat in his studio. A conversation between Larry Gagosian, Fred Hoffman, filmmaker Tamra Davis, and the artist’s sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, will be featured, along with an essay where Hoffman reflects on the works that Basquiat produced in Los Angeles, discussing the complex symbolism and restless innovation that permeated his oeuvre.

Larry Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles presented three exhibitions with Basquiat during the artist’s lifetime: Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings at 619 North Almont Drive, April 8–May 8, 1982; Jean-Michel Basquiat: New Paintings at 510 North Robertson Boulevard, March 8–April 2, 1983; and Jean-Michel Basquiat at 510 North Robertson Boulevard, January 7–February 8, 1986. Made on Market Street is the seventh exhibition of Basquiat’s work that Gagosian has presented since the artist’s passing in 1988.