Basquiat Soundtracks

Basquiat Soundtracks : Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Dizzy), 1983, Private Collection © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York.    Basquiat Soundtracks : Jean-Michel Basquiat, King Zulu, 1986, MACBA, Barcelone © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York.    Basquiat Soundtracks : Test Pattern (aka Gray) at Hurrah, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Shannon Dawson, New York, 1980 © Courtesy of Nicholas Taylor    Basquiat Soundtracks : Jean-Michel Basquiat, Toxic, 1984, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York.   


The exhibition


As shown in a deluge of images and sounds in the crazy performative exhibition Basquiat Soundtracks at the Philharmonie de Paris, the artist found his nervous style and his photocopied rhythm, made of riffs and scratches rapped in the hip-hop style, rhymes and scats improvised in the jazz style, chopped sentences and invective words as in slam, in contact with the incredible New York musical effervescence of the 1940s to 1980s. While bebop was no longer fashionable, this music freak devoted his first works to Max Roach and Charlie Parker - his tragic double, who died of alcohol and drug abuse at the age of 34 - in 1982, by incising the circle of LPs in white on minimalist black canvases. In 1986, King Zulu's invasive Mississippi Blue Wave mocks the carnival figure of Louis Armstrong, while paying homage to Afrika Bambaataa's Zulu Nation, the tragic Twombly-like diptych of Eroica, based on Beethoven's symphony of the same name, shows the undiminished artistic powers of a drug-ravaged man, who paints his last blues in tormented blue-gray tones, mixing the words "Eroica" and "Man dies"...

Extrait de l'article de Emmanuel Daydé publié dans le N°106 de la revue Art Absolument. Parution le 17 mai 2023


When


06/04/2023 - 30/07/2023
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