Last year, the Brant Foundation hosted an expansive Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition in New York’s East Village, reuniting some of the artist’s best-known works in the place where many of them were created. Now, as the Covid crisis continues to prevent many people from attending galleries freely, the foundation has made the exhibition available online. It’s a welcome chance to immerse ourselves in the artist’s singular world, replete with his signature iconography (masks, skulls et al), elusive symbols, diagrams and distinctive scribbles, and irony-seeped text—as embodied by this excellent 1983 work, In Italian.
