Basquiat x Warhol

The Brant Foundation is pleased to announce Basquiat x Warhol at the Foundation’s East Village location, curated by Dr. Dieter Buchhart and Peter M. Brant in collaboration with Dr. Anna Karina Hofbauer. On view November 1, 2023 through January 7, 2024, this is the first time the collaboration has been the subject of a major New York exhibition since Andy Warhol & Jean-Michel Basquiat at Gagosian Gallery in 1997. The exhibition is traveling from Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, France, and has benefited from the collaboration between the two institutions.

The Brant Foundation opened its East Village space in 2019 with a landmark exhibition of Jean-Michel Basquiat, reuniting the East Village with a legendary artist who had a profound influence on the downtown arts community. This past spring, the Foundation presented Thirty Are Better Than One, a career-encompassing Andy Warhol exhibition, bringing to the space yet another leading artist of postwar New York. Now, with Basquiat x Warhol, the Foundation presents the artists together with a selection of masterpieces from their influential collaboration in the early eighties, unseen together in New York for over 20 years.

Basquiat and Warhol occupied two distinct spaces in New York’s 1980s art scene. Although the two artists were familiar with each other—Warhol had even purchased two of Basquiat and Jennifer Stein’s early Anti-Product Baseball Cards in 1979 —it was not until their formal introduction at Warhol’s Factory in 1982 did the two form a friendship that would result in one of the most iconic collaborations of the 20th century.

“In their collaboration, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol came together and opened new ideas and spaces of thought that mirror both our present time as well as the past and future. The results are brilliant artworks that continue to have an impact in our own time as they appear to address pressing and highly relevant contemporary topics such as racism and consumerism. Their collaboration was a unique project and probably one of the greatest and most enduring in all of art history,” says Dr. Buchhart.

Sixteen of the paintings were first shown to the public in 1985 at Tony Shafrazi’s New York gallery. Nevertheless, the exhibition received a cold reception by the media, which eventually lead to the end of their collaboration later that year. Both artists continue to have monumental individual success after their deaths in the late eighties, although few exhibitions have focused on their collaborative artworks. Basquiat x Warhol at the Brant Foundation reasserts the impact of artistic collaboration across generations and genres while showcasing their shared inspirations, mutual trust, and political concerns.