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We could all do with a splash of colour in our lives right now – and kaleidoscopic art from a graffiti pioneer-turned-cultural icon sounds like just the ticket. Jean-Michel Basquiat was a master of all things big, bright and brash, and now you can see more than 100 of his most famous works in a virtual exhibition from Paris’s Fondation Louis Vuitton.
From his beginnings tagging Brooklyn’s backstreets to his whirlwind ascent on to the international art gallery circuit, the self-titled exhibition brings together works from across Basquiat’s short career – right up until his death, aged 27, in 1988. Spread over the sprawling Fondation’s four light-filled floors, each room of the exhibition is dedicated to a different theme of his work: street life, religion, death. And thanks to an unprecedented range of one-off loans – including from private collections – rarely has the full range of his accomplished naïf style, all graffiti-style imagery and punchy scrawled text, been so clear for all to see.
On the walls, you’ll discover plenty of classics – like his ‘Dos Cabezas’ self-portrait, in which he appears next to a certain Andy Warhol – but also lesser-known works including ‘Heads’, a haunting triptych of skulls exhibited publicly for the first time in this show (which ran from October 2018 to January 2019). The video tour, which is in English, is available now on the Fondation’s YouTube channel. You can also watch it below:
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