02/04/2026
Inpiration for new collection:
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988)👇🏻
Jean-Michel Basquiat was among a group of young artists in New York who emerged as the worlds of art and music collided and who embraced a new style infused with elements of graffiti and hip-hop culture. He first gained notoriety with cryptic graffiti messages he left across downtown Manhattan, but by 1980 Basquiat was working on canvas, using paint sticks to draw symbols such as crowns, halos, and fragments of the human anatomy. 💀
Basquiat first achieved notoriety in the late 1970s as part of the graffiti duo SAMO, alongside Al Diaz, writing enigmatic epigrams all over Manhattan, particularly in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side where disco, punk, and street art coalesced into early hip-hop culture. By the early 1980s, his paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. At 21, Basquiat became the youngest artist to ever take part in Documenta in Kassel, Germany. At 22, he became one of the youngest to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial in New York. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his artwork in 1992.✅
Basquiat died at the age of 27 in 1988 of a he**in overdose. Since then, his work has steadily increased in value. In 2017, Untitled, a 1982 painting depicting a black skull with red-and-yellow rivulets, sold for a record-breaking $110.5 million, becoming one of the most expensive paintings ever purchased.🙏
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