JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: MADE ON MARKET STREET
Gagosian announces Made on Market Street, the first exhibition focused exclusively on works that Jean-Michel Basquiat produced in Los Angeles. Curated by Fred Hoffman with Larry Gagosian and with exhibition design by Stefan Beckman.
March 7 – June 1, 2024
Between November 1982 and May 1984, Basquiat produced approximately a hundred paintings, numerous works on paper, and six silkscreen editions in Venice, California. For an artist closely affiliated with the New York art scene of the 1980s, Basquiat was extraordinarily prolific in Los Angeles. Made on Market Street reflects on this consequential era by bringing together nearly thirty works—several of which are among his most important paintings.
After first meeting Basquiat in 1981, Gagosian invited him to Los Angeles. Basquiat’s solo exhibition with Larry Gagosian Gallery in LA—the first time his work was presented on the West Coast—opened in April 1982, immediately following his first solo show in New York at Annina Nosei’s gallery. The Los Angeles exhibition was seen as the arrival of a significant voice by the public and collectors alike. In November 1982 Basquiat returned to California, living and working at Gagosian’s residence on Market Street, a three-story structure with an interior courtyard open to the light and air from the beach nearby.
That same year, Basquiat met Fred Hoffman, who was running New City Editions, and together they would produce six editioned prints, including Tuxedo (1982) and Untitled (1983), large-scale silkscreen works on canvas. Featuring white text, sketches, and directional arrows on a black ground, Tuxedo contrasts with Basquiat’s intensely colorful paintings of the era, its dense collection of allusive phrases ascending to the crown at its top.
In the summer of 1983, Basquiat was drawn back to Los Angeles. He returned to Market Street, this time establishing his own studio a few doors down and remaining there until late in the spring of 1984. One night, while Basquiat was working, he went outside to a fenced-in courtyard just behind the studio, where he encountered an unhoused person sleeping.
After this incident the courtyard’s fence was removed, but instead of disposing of the wooden slats Basquiat integrated them as supports for some of his most iconic paintings—Flexible, Gold Griot, and M (all 1984), all of which will be exhibited as a group in Made on Market Street for the first time since they were created. With Flexible, Basquiat expanded his portrayal of the Black male, presenting a larger-than-life figure whose elastic, expressive arm gesture combines the artist’s interests in anatomy, symbolism, and qualities he characterized as “royalty, heroism, and the streets.”
Made on Market Street is accompanied by a catalogue that reproduces the exhibited works together with archival material, including installation images from the 1982 and 1983 exhibitions at Larry Gagosian Gallery, historical ephemera, and exhibition reviews, as well as previously unpublished photographs of Basquiat in his studio.