Jean-Michel Basquiat at Louis Vuitton Foundation

Exceptional day at the Fondation Louis Vuitton to see the Jean-Michel Basquiat exposition.  The gallery is a monumental structure in the Bois de Boulogne, a sprawling park-come-forest, on the périphérique of Paris, and it's just the best experience to visit the gallery and then wander back through the Bois to the metro.

The exposition was fabulous, partly because of the immense, soaring rooms of the Fondation that  serve to frame and highlight the work.  I love this gallery - even the journey between floors is an opportunity to enjoy the angles and curves of the building and the way the light plays through the "sails".

I don't know a lot about Basquiat, so there was lots learnt from my perspective!  One of his favourite books from an early age was Gray's Anatomy, and many of Basquiat's works are dissected or x-ray-type views.  He was a compiler of lists - copying words, facts, diagrams from sources in the domains of history, alchemy, geography, chemistry, the Bible, cartography, dictionaries - and these lists provided material for, and were encompassed in his works.  In addition to combining paint, pencil, words, Xerox copies in his work, he would use items from the streets and represent them in his work in the same context as they existed in the street.  For example, the background of a fence in his painting of Anthony Clarke, who was a street artist known as A-One, was fence palings taken from the street.

There were all kinds of symbols and commentary in the works, reflective of the times as Basquiat saw them:  racism, politics, power structures, and the people he admired and drew inspiration from.  In his short history of exhibitions he was invariably the youngest person to ever have been exhibited in those forums, and it is incredibly sad that he was only 27 when he died.