By Coco Marett
More commonly, artists use art to express what words often cannot. But in the case of Jean-Michel Basquiat, words actually became the art itself. The Peninsula speaks with Dr. Dieter Buchhart, who recently curated the exhibition 'Words Are All We Have: Paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat' at New York's Nahmad Contemporary.
"If you read the canvases out loud to yourself, the repetition, the rhythm, you can hear Jean-Michel thinking," hip-hop forerunner Fab 5 Freddy once aptly said about his friend and collaborator, artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Nahmad Contemporary in New York recently hosted 'Words Are All We Have" Paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat', an exhibition organised by curator and pre-eminent Basquiat scholar, Dr. Dieter Buchhart. The exhibition highlighted the artist's innovative incorporation of literature and music in his work, and featured a collection of some of Basquiat's most groundbreaking works - all of which included his iconic combination of words, signs and pictograms.
Combining fragments of literature, music, poetry, and science, the language in Basquiat's work is in fact of its own; one so unique to the artist, but which spoke to - and continues to speak to - people of all over the world.