uitgegeven bij de gelijknamige tentoonstelling in de gallery

als nieuw

If he were alive today, Jean-Michel Basquiat would be 54 years old: an artist comfortably in mid-career, maybe forgotten, maybe looking forward to a retrospective or two. Would his star have faded? Would he have moved on from his early style, or would he still be making the hotheaded, volatile paintings and drawings he ground out so quickly in the 1980s? Who can say? Basquiat stormed the New York art world in 1981, but in 1988, with more than 1,000 paintings behind him, he overdosed. He will never be more than 27.

Basquiat’s eternal youth, reflected in the energy and anger of his paintings and drawings, goes a long way to explaining the endless queues for Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now’s the Time, which opened earlier this month at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. With more that 80 artworks, it’s the most significant retrospective of Basquiat’s work in North America since the Brooklyn Museum’s show in 2005. (In April the Brooklyn Museum will be presenting a smaller show of Basquiat’s notebooks. Both the AGO and Brooklyn shows are curated by Dieter Buchhart, an Austrian art historian.) Some of his art, notably the works on paper, look fantastic after 30 years. Others look hopelessly overblown. But all of it attests to a career of promise – snuffed out too soon, and perhaps celebrated today for the wrong reasons.

Graffity, streetart