Booth G09
“If Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet had a baby and gave it up for adoption, it would be Jean-Michel.”
– Rene Ricard
During Frieze Master’s 2024 Omer Tiroche Gallery will examine the striking relationship between the works of Jean Dubuffet and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and in particular their exploration of the human figure. In addition to their stylistic innovations, the exhibition will explore the thematic connections between the two artists.
The careers of both artists briefly overlapped, but the effect of Dubuffet’s work on the younger Basquiat was significant, eventually exhibiting alongside one another at Galerie Beyeler in 1983. Basquiat, often referred to as the child of Jean Dubuffet, was profoundly influenced by Dubuffet's work in the 1970s. After encountering Dubuffet’s Théâtres de mémoire at the Pace Gallery in New York, Basquiat became a regular visitor, meticulously studying the pieces. This immersion in Dubuffet's Art Brut significantly shaped Basquiat's artistic practice. In the late 70s, inspired by Dubuffet, Basquiat began spraying graffiti on buildings in lower Manhattan under the pseudonym SAMO.
The two shared the same desire to rebel against the traditional art canon, believing that accuracy and realism fell short of capturing the true essence of the figure. Employing diverse techniques, Dubuffet and Basquiat blended dynamic, ambiguous, and pared-down figures with exuberant colour palettes and compositions, breathing life into their work and challenging conventional visual realism. Dubuffet’s frenzied Paris Circus series and interlocking shapes of his later Hourloupe works are echoed in Basquiat’s colourful and faux-naïve depictions of urban icons. Similarly, their figures often appeared solitary, rarely in groups, on stark isolating backgrounds, reflecting a sense of their own alienation.
L'homme à la toque, 1956 which belongs to Dubuffet's Tableaux d’assemblages series, is a striking example of his assemblage technique: richly textured paintings on canvas inspired by the landscape in the South of France, that were then impulsively cut into new shapes and configurations. This "assemblage" process involved treating the painted canvas like a source material, allowing Dubuffet to break free from traditional representation and create raw, aerial compositions through the rearrangement of the pieces. His fascination with Parisian wartime graffiti fuelled the energetic scribbles and marks in L'homme à la toque, the figure functioning as a portrait of the city walls, their dense layers of "scars and inscriptions" a testament to the city's past and present struggles.
Mirroring Dubuffet, Basquiat embraced collage. He created his own elements by manipulating Xerox copies of his drawings: multiplying them, cutting them apart, and layering them onto canvas. Acrylics, spray paints, and oil sticks then added depth, partially obscuring the underlying Xerox fragments. In Red Joy, 1984, a vivid crimson border frames the canvas contrasting sharply with the underlying images and drawing attention to the central black figure, Joy. This solitary, ungrounded figure serves as an existential symbol of Basquiat’s struggle as the only black man in an overwhelmingly white art world, despite his immense success.
Hailed as two pioneers of Outsider Art, the pair’s experimentation with figuration rejected the notion of conventional depiction and reinterpreted the human figure.
Their works are a testament to their belief that traditional methods were insufficient for expressing the complexities and rawness of human experience. Dubuffet’s crude, textured surfaces and Basquiat’s graffiti-inspired strokes both draw from the chaotic energy of urban life, appropriating the everyday to create a dialogue that transcends their own personal histories and individual practices.
