"I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life."
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) is one of the most significant and celebrated artists of the twentieth century - a self-taught painter who emerged from the graffiti underground of New York's Lower East Side to become the defining figure of Neo-Expressionism and the artist who brought the African-American and Latino experience into the centre of the contemporary art world. Beginning with the cryptic SAMO tags he spray-painted across lower Manhattan as a teenager, Basquiat developed a visual language of extraordinary complexity and urgency - combining text, anatomy, art history, and cultural critique on canvases of raw expressive force. At twenty-one he became the youngest artist to participate in Documenta, Kassel. His celebrated collaboration with Andy Warhol produced approximately 160 joint works between 1983 and 1985. He died of an accidental overdose in August 1988, aged twenty-seven. His auction record of $110.5 million was set at Sotheby's New York in 2017. His works are held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA New York, the Broad Los Angeles, and the Fondation Beyeler Basel, among many others.