Artist community
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) emerged from the downtown New York scene of the late 1970s, first as half of the graffiti duo SAMO, spray-painting cryptic aphorisms across Lower Manhattan. By the early 1980s he had moved into painting proper, exhibiting internationally and becoming, at 21, the youngest artist ever included in Documenta in Kassel. His canvases fuse text, drawing, and figuration—skulls, crowns, anatomical diagrams, and fragments of history—layering social critique on race, power, and poverty with raw, immediate mark-making rooted in Neo-expressionism and primitivist reference.
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