Images © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat

01.12.11: Gallery

"I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is."
- Jean Michel Basquiat

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Jean-Michel Basquiat, aka SAMO, and the turbulent period from the late 1970s to 1988, as his life was catapulted into fame and notoriety. As Jean-Michel's work gained favourable attention from New York's elite art community, he went from a street punk living in a cardboard box to the first black artist to succeed in the all-white dominated art world - Michele Goodson.

01.12.11: DECIPHERING THE CODE

Basquiat's parallels to the career of Egon Schiele are remarkable. Basquiat's works are marked by the kind of intensity and energy that also determined the course of his brief life. Like Schiele, in just eight years he not only managed to create an extensive oeuvre, but also to establish new figurative and expressive elements alongside Conceptual and Minimal Art. At the age of twenty-one, he became the youngest artist ever to be invited to the documenta, while his work also anticipated that of Germany's Junge Wilde movement and the art of the nineties.