JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: VENUS
Gagosian is pleased to announce Venus, a pairing of two rarely seen masterpieces from different millennia. This is Gagosian’s eleventh exhibition dedicated to Basquiat and demonstrates the gallery’s ongoing commitment to the artist’s legacy.
October 17 – December 20, 2024
Untitled is one of eight large-scale paintings that Basquiat made in Modena, Italy, in the summer of 1982 at the age of twenty-one. Produced at the invitation of collector and art dealer Emilio Mazzoli for an exhibition that never came to fruition, the works were not shown together until they were reunited last summer at Fondation Beyeler in Riehen/Basel, more than four decades after they were made.
The paintings that comprise the Modena series are some of the most expressive and vivid of Basquiat’s career; ripe with ideas and complexity, they collectively give the impression of an opera with multiple acts. With heavy, dripping brushstrokes and compositions dominated mostly by single figures, the canvases share a fiery, emotional intensity, conveying a dynamic narrative told through the impassioned gestures of the main characters: angel, devil, prophet, miser, farmhand, and Venus. Untitled is the only work from the series to feature a female figure and alludes most directly to classical mythology.
Untitled unites Basquiat’s command of color and energetic composition with references to art of the past. Two female figures emerge from passages of vigorously applied teal, yellow, and black paint amid cipher-like marks and numerals. The work recalls Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c. 1485), while the figures’ starkly abstracted features play off the Cubist innovations of Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), as does the still life of fruit arrayed between them.
Gagosian’s exhibition in Paris juxtaposes Basquiat’s painting with a remarkable marble statue of Venus from Imperial Rome, on loan from the Torlonia Collection, Rome, which is considered the most important private collection of Roman art in the world.