Jean-Michel Basquiat

Features Basquiat's work from 1981 – the year of his first official participation in the group exhibition New York/New Wave at PS1 of New York – to his premature death in 1988.

Controversial cult artist, enfant terrible of the art world, friend of Haring and Warhol, youth idol, and tragic victim of a heroin overdose, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a legend in his own lifetime.

This catalogue, published in conjunction with the major retrospective at the Lugano Museum of Modern Art, provides an excellent overview of Basquiat's life and work. Basquiat is the only African-American painter to have made a significant impact on the history of art. From his origins as a street graffiti artist, he soon became one of the most influential artists of his time – achieving the status of art world sensation.

His explosive, colourful and apparently naïve canvases have an unparalleled communicative force revealing an anguish of the contemporary world.

The brief but intense artistic career of this celebrated and "mythologised" exponent of the downtown New York art scene of the 1980s is covered through some fifty paintings and twenty works on paper drawn from prestigious private collections and museums, offering a new occasion for dialogue with the more modern expressions of 20th-century art.