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