Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist. An obscure NYC graffiti artist in the late 1970s, Basquiat evolved into an acclaimed Neo-expressionist and Primitivist painter by the 1980s.
Focusing on “suggestive dichotomies”, his art is a synergy of appropriation, poetry, drawing and painting. Novel in their marriage of text and image, abstraction and figuration, and historical information with contemporary critique, Basquiat’s paintings act as social comments, attacking power structures and systems of racism, while his poetics are acutely critical of colonialism and support class struggle.