Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol will be honored at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in 2023 for a “four handed exhibition”.

Copyright : Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat

Around 160 canvases together

After the “Jean-Michel Basquiat” exhibition in 2018, the Foundation Louis Vuitton continues its exploration of the artist’s work, revealing his collaboration with Andy Warhol. From 1984 to 1985, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) and Andy Warhol (1928-1987) produced around 160 canvases together, “four-handed”, some of which were among the greatest of their respective careers. Witness to their friendship and this common production, Keith Haring (1958-1990) will speak of a “conversation occurring through painting, instead of words”, and of two minds merging to create a “third, separate and unique “. “Basquiat x Warhol, à quatre mains”, the most important exhibition ever devoted to this singular work, will bring together more than a hundred canvases signed jointly; Individual works by each artist will also be presented, as well as a group of works by Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Kenny Scharf… in order to restore the artistic scene of downtown New York in the 1980s.

A series of crossed portraits

The exhibition opens with a series of crossed portraits, Basquiat by Warhol, Warhol by Basquiat. It continues with the first collaborations. Initiated by the gallery owner of the two artists, Bruno Bischofberger, these works benefit from the participation of the Italian painter Francesco Clemente (born in 1952). After these fifteen works as a trio, Basquiat and Warhol continue their collaboration with enthusiasm and complicity, at an almost daily pace. The energy and strength of their incessant exchanges will lead visitors along the route through all of the Foundation’s galleries. Basquiat admires Warhol as an elder, a key figure in the art world, initiator of a new language and an original relationship to popular culture. In return, Warhol found in Basquiat a renewed interest in painting. With him, he resumed painting manually, on a very large scale. Warhol’s subjects (press titles, logos of General Electric, Paramount, the Olympic Games) serve as a structure for real series that punctuate the course. The exhibition shows these back and forths, a dialogue of styles and forms that also deals with crucial subjects such as the insertion of the Afro-American community into the North American narrative, a continent of which Warhol was one of the great manufacturers of icons.

Louis Vuitton Foundation

8 av. of Mahatma Gandhi – Paris

https://www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr/fr/evenements/basquiat-x-warhol-a-quatre-mains