I've got to admit to feeling a little bit emotional when I first came in here
And you must with seeing it complete?
Yeah, absolutely I mean it's a project we've been working on
for nearly three years now and actually in the setup of
it as a project we had all of these scale one paper cutouts of all of the
works and we felt like we had this vision of what the show would look like
and of course we'd produce the book so we had all of these images and we had
some real sense of the work but the minute they all physically came into the
space it was really a very different kind of experience and it's actually
a reminder that many of the pieces I mean, Piscine, Jack Johnson, lots of the works
we're seeing around us are sculptural as much as they are paintings and as such
they have this amazing physical presence in the space
I'm fascinated by the idea of the epigenetic inheritance
this idea of memory that transfers over generations
I think particularly across generations who've experienced trauma so Holocaust
survivors who pass on to their children this kind of sense of trauma which often
becomes inverted into incredible creative gifts but sometimes into
different forms of mental illness and one recognizes in some of this work the
way in which for peoples of African descent there's a sort of parallel
experience of slavery of colonialism of racism somehow having an impact on
generations and and I think I often feel that this work is a kind of map of some of that
Definitely, and I think one of the things that's fascinating is how
much he read biographies I think he was really an autobiographies particularly I
think it was really interested in how individuals then narrated their own life
experience of exactly those kinds of conditions how they faced racism how
they dealt with it and also how society conditioned their reception so you know
we have a great piece like Jack Johnson about the world heavyweight champion
brilliant in this kind of graphic simplicity but we also know that Jack
Johnson was somebody who faced considerable backlash from the press
because he tended to date white women equally you have a piece like Jesse
over here about the great track and field athlete Jesse Owens and there are
these tiny little details like the word pecho which is Spanish for chest and
Jesse Owens when he was a child had a fibrous lump removed from his chest
because his mother couldn't afford medical treatment and this kind of
formative part of his narrative which is written about in the autobiography is
then written on the canvas to give some sense that Basquiat is really familiar with
the personal struggles they have gone through to get to where they are but
also of what they represent in terms of these wider narratives as you say
So this is Ishtar named after the ancient Egyptian god of fertility you have that
sense of real fecundity in the color of this work as well as of course lots of
references to ancient Egypt but also to the representation of Egypt within the
Bible so 'temple' for instance gives us of course to Egypt but also takes us to
Samson and the destruction of the temple and we have that reference again in
Revelations and in Kings and even 'in side view of an oxen's jaw'
you know over here on the other side of the space we have 'Jawbone of an Ass'
The title taken from Samson - 'with the jawbone of an ass have I slain
a thousand men' - so we often have these words that at first seem almost as if
they're kind of Basquiat's wordplay and actually when we spend a little time with them
we realize why they're so evocative because we're already familiar with them somehow
But it's also wonderful the way in which he uses that
sort of familiar sort of graffiti style and it's like he understands all of that
history but he wants to impose upon all of the things that I guess most people
love and value in the way of order he's going to inscribe upon it this new
history, the new re-rendering of the way in which we
see the world and he paints these glorious colors that for anyone who's
traveled in Africa will recognize them from the buildings from the flags and it
just imposes his history upon a kind of traditional Western history
Absolutely. And you have this at the heart of this triptych which was actually made we know
that he hinged these so they could fit out the elevator of his building but in
the heart of this we have this punching fist and of course he makes lots of
these cartoon references and you've got the stars and motion arrows around it
and the thunderbolt but it also of course gives us the raised fist of
Tommie Smith at the Mexico Games in 1968 the Black Power movement the sense of
everything that it takes to raise one's fist and to break through
So this is Leonardo da Vinci's Greatest Hits very playful title of course he was
working off his copy of Leonardo which we have in one of the showcases and one
of the things I love about this is that sort of sense of tricksterism,
that sense of taking this quite, you know, very illustrious figure and reworking
him in the way that Basquiat wants to so we have the studies of human leg plus
the bone of the man the leg in man and dog which of course is one of Leonardo's
famous drawings but there are also great nods to Leonardo so we have the word
'calves' written here and then above it says 'sevlac' which is 'calves' written
backwards in a nod to Leonardo's mirror writing so there are lots of kind of
in-references within the work to his knowledge of Leonardo
But also this sort of cheekiness as well, of Prometheus this idea of you know stealing his kind of
his genius from the gods and that he's prepared to look back
at these really great artistic giants
Absolutely and famously Prometheus when he steals the fire for
the people is struck down by the Titans with the thunderbolt so there are all of
these little references scattered a possible across the piece
So in this piece you feel somehow like he's referencing all of art history
and yet he's condensing, distilling it down into something that feels uniquely his own
It's such a privilege to see all of this work together and it makes a
kind of sense not just of the man but also of a period of art history and
you've just got to come and see it! It's such a privilege to be in this space with this work
It is an honour
It's a once in a lifetime opportunity