Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) is one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century — a Brooklyn-born painter of Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage whose decade-long career produced a body of work that transformed the relationship between street art, Neo-Expressionism, and the New York gallery system, and whose auction record of $110.5 million, set at Sotheby's in 2017, places him among the most commercially valuable artists in history.
He began as SAMO — the street art tag he shared with Al Diaz in the late 1970s, appearing on walls across Lower Manhattan with aphoristic phrases that announced a visual intelligence looking for a larger canvas. That canvas arrived when his postcard paintings caught the attention of gallerist Annina Nosei and collector Diego Cortez, and his career accelerated with a speed that the New York art world of the early 1980s had rarely witnessed. His friendships and collaborations with Andy Warhol and Keith Haring placed him at the centre of one of the most creative moments in recent American cultural history.
His visual language is immediately recognisable and entirely his own: obsessive scribbling, anatomical diagrams, mysterious symbols, the recurring crown, the skull, the snake, text fragments in multiple languages — all deployed across surfaces of extraordinary physical energy. His Caribbean heritage, his experience of race in America, and his voracious engagement with art history, music, and street culture are all present simultaneously in his best work.
Major retrospectives at the Barbican London (2017), the Guggenheim New York (2019), and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (2021) have confirmed his canonical status. The works available through Creed Gallery are screenprints from his posthumous estate editions, accompanied by full documentation. Available through Creed Gallery, Ascot, for collectors across Berkshire, Surrey, and London.
