Ocula Report Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber 15 Mar 2019 : Stephanie Bailey for Ocula In Meiro Koizumi's three-channel video installation, The Angels of Testimony (2019), the central frame features an interview with Hajime Kondo about his time as a solider of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The conversation centres on war crimes perpetrated in China, including the beheading of Chinese prisoners for...
Ocula Conversation Diana Campbell Betancourt Diana Campbell Betancourt is a curator working predominantly across South and Southeast Asia. Since 2013 she has been the founding artistic director of the Samdani Art Foundation and chief curator of the Dhaka Art Summit in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a transnational art event that has grown in size and scale ever since its first edition in 2012. Backed by...
Ocula Report Chinternet Ugly at Manchester’s Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art 7 Mar 2019 : Mike Pinnington for Ocula China, home to 802 million internet users, is subject to sophisticated online censorship. This shrouded state of affairs, unsurprisingly perhaps, serves to reinforce stereotypes around conformity elsewhere. Any realm, digital or otherwise, subject to such strict scrutiny must necessarily be bland and uncritical, right? I was mulling over such...
Born in Brooklyn in 1960, Basquiat was a graffiti artist and musician. He first achieved notoriety as part of SAMO, an informal group of young people who tagged mysterious epigrams in the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the late 1970s.
From his early years, he was fascinated with stardom and in particular Jimi Hendrix, Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin. In his late teens he began to sell T-shirts and postcards.
He painted on just about anything he could find: refrigerator, laboratory coats, cardboard boxes and doors. After SAMO disbanded in 1979 he turned his focus to painting which displayed a combination of Abstract Expressionism and Graffiti Art.
They focused on aspects of contemporary culture and featured baseball players, the Kennedy assassination and consumer items such as Pez sweets. His art was exhibited publicly for the first time as part of a group exhibition called the T__imes Square Show.
The show represented the merging of two very distinct subcultures: the Downtown avant-garde consisting of Neo-Pop and the Uptown avant-garde of rap and graffiti in hip hop culture. In the early 1980s he befriended Andy Warhol and the two artists, both with an interest in representing aspects of contemporary culture, collaborated on a number of works. Basquiat combined Aztec, African, and Roman and Greek imagery, with his own unique iconography. Basquiat's legacy lies in his ability to bridge the gap between graffiti and the gallery. He died of a drug overdose in 1988.
Jean-Michel BasquiatUntitled (Two Heads on Gold), 1982 Acrylic and oil paintstick on canvas,
Jean-Michel BasquiatUntitled (Julius Caesar on Gold), 1981 Acrylic and oil paintstick on canvas,
Jean-Michel BasquiatUntitled, 1981 Acrylic, oil stick and pencil on canvas, 
Ocula Conversation Dr Dieter Buchhart Co-curator of the exhibition: 'Basquiat: Boom for Real' at the Barbican, London Curator and scholar Dr Dieter Buchhart is the co-curator of the Barbican's current exhibition, Basquiat: Boom for Real (21 September 2017–28 January 2018), alongside Barbican curator Eleanor Nairne. Organised in collaboration with the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and with the support of the Basquiat Exhibition Circle and the Basquiat family, the...
Related Press Painting From the 1980s, When Brash Met Flash The New York Times : 12 February 2017 In New York at the end of the 1970s, many people thought painting was all washed up. And if not washed up, it had to be abstract—the more austere, unemotional and geometric, the better.Then came the 1980s and a generation of young painters, like Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Eric Fischl, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, and everything...
Related Press The first major UK Basquiat exhibition is coming Dazed : 6 October 2016 Jean Michel-Basquiat is a name synonymous with New York’s art scene in the 80s. A cultural movement so strong that memories of it have become mythological. It’s surprisingly then that not a single work of the art prodigy’s is held in a public UK collection. There has also, in the 28 years since his death, never been a major...
Related Press Basquiat’s former home and studio gets a permanent plaque Hyperallergic : 16 July 2016 Yesterday, a permanent plaque was unveiled outside the former home and studio of Jean-Michel Basquiat at 57 Great Jones Street in Manhattan. The marker is part of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation’s (GVSHP) Historic Plaque Program, a partnership with local pizza business Two Boots. Basquiat lived and worked in the...
Related Press Paving The Way For Artists Lee Woo-young for the Korea Herald / 5 December 2014 : 10 December 2014 On display in the private office of Lee Hyun-sook on the top floor of her gallery in Seoul are items from some of the most significant contemporary exhibitions in Korea over the last couple of years.The small space overlooking Gyeongbokgung Palace is ultramodern, with a sculpture by Anish Kapoor, a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat and a glass...
