Jean-Michel Basquiat - Barbican

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1982

Basquiat: Boom for Real is at Barbican Art Gallery until 28 January 2018.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s star burned bright and brief. In 1976, aged 16, he and Al Diaz, working as SAMO (‘Same Old Shit’) spray painted cryptic messages on buildings in Lower Manhattan; in 1979 their partnership ended, marked by the graffito SAMO is dead. In 1980, he showed work in a mixed exhibition in New York, was picked up by a gallery and met Andy Warhol with whom he went on to collaborate. Through the early and middle 1980s he exhibited widely in America and internationally and was written about in the art press; in 1988, he died of a drug overdose, aged 27. In 2017, Untitled, 1982 sold for $110.5 million (£85 million).

The paintings he made in the 1980s pulse with energy and bristle with ideas; texts and images combine and collide in an expressionist explosion. He was a hip-hop Cy Twombly. This will be an exhilarating exhibition.

Read reviews by Waldemar Januszczak, Joe Lloyd, Sarah Kent, Mark Hudson, Jonathan Jones; read an interview with exhibition curator Eleanor Nairne.
Click on images to enlarge.

Jean-Michel-Basquiat, Untitled, 1980

Jean-Michel-Basquiat, Skull, 1981

Jean-Michel-Basquiat, Leonardo da Vinci's Greatest Hits, 1982

Jean-Michel-Basquiat, Hollywood Africans, 1983

Jean-Michel-Basquiat, Pablo Picasso,  1984

Jean-Michel-Basquiat, Self Portrait, 1984

Jean-Michel-Basquiat, Glenn, 1985

Jean-Michel-Basquiat, King Zulu, 1986

Postscript
Banksy has paid his own hommage to Basquiat with a couple of pieces on the Barbican walls -

Banksy, 2017

Strange and Familiar - Barbican Art Gallery

Bruce Gilden, London, 2011-13 (installation in Strange and Familiar)

Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers is at Barbican Art Gallery until 19 June 2016.
Robert Frank’s book The Americans is rightly regarded as one of the masterpieces of C20 photography. It was controversial on its initial reception in the United States, in 1959, both for its relaxed, subjective style of photography and because it presented an uncomfortably honest picture of 1950s America.
The freshness of Frank’s perception of America is typically, in part, ascribed to his status as an outsider: a Swiss immigrant seeing the country without prejudice. Frank never did a book called 'The British', but had he done so it would have featured some of the pictures included in Strange and Familiar.
This exhibition, curated by Martin Parr, presents views of Britain as seen through the lenses of photographers from other countries, from the 1930s to today. There are few, perhaps, who can match Frank's effortless style, but the mix delivers facinating insights into the British character alongside nostalgia and the occasional, inevitable stereotype.
Read reviews by Mark Hudson, Ben Luke, Andrew Dickson, Eliza Williams, and an article by Ian Jack; see a complete list of exhibits with introductions to the photographers.
(Click on images to enlarge.)

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Coronation of King George VI, London, 1937

Robert Frank, City of London, 1951

Cas Oorthuys, London, 1953

Sergio Larrain, Baker Street Underground Station, 1958-9

Cas Oorthuys, Oxford students 1962

Frank Habicht, Time, Gentleman, please! City of London, 1960s

Bruce Davidson, Wales, 1965.

Candida Hofer, Liverpool IX, 1968

Akihiko Okamura, Northern Ireland, 1970s

Evelyn Hofer, Bus conductress and postman, London, 1977

Shinro Ohtake, from the series UK77, 1977–1978.

Raymond Depardon, Glasgow, 1980 

Bruce Gilden, London, 2011-13

Constructing Worlds - Barbican

Bas Princen, Cooling Plant, Dubai, 2009

Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age is at the Barbican until 11 January 2015.
Photography and modern architecture were made for each other. If I was given a free hand to organise my dream photography exhibition, I think it might look like this. The list of photographers involved is fabulous and includes, amongst others, Bernd and Hilla Becher (see also here), Walker Evans, Luigi Ghirri, Andreas Gursky, Nadav Kander (see also here), Simon Norfolk, Ed Ruscha, Stephen Shore, Thomas Struth, Hiroshi Sugimoto. (Click on images to enlarge.)
Read a reviews by Rowan Moore and Sean O'Hagan and an interview with curator Elias Redstone in Dezeen.

Iwan Baan, Torre David #1 - Facade, 2011

Luigi Ghirri, Cemetery of San Cataldo, Modena (designed by Aldo Rossi), 1985

Nadav Kander, Fengjie III (Monument to Progress and Prosperity) , Chongqing Municipality, 2007

Simon Norfolk, Former Soviet-era 'Palace of Culture', Kabul, 2001-02

Bas Princen, Mokattam Ridge (Garbage Recycling City), Cairo, 2009

Ed Ruscha, 5000 W Carling Way, (Los Angeles), 1967/1999

Stephen Shore, Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1974

Julius Shulman, Case Study House #22 (Stahl House, Los Angeles, California, Architect Pierre Koenig), 1960

Thomas Struth, ClintonRoad, London, 1977

Hiroshi Sugimoto, World Trade Center (Minoru Yamasaki), 1997

Guy Tillim, Apartment Building, Beira, Mozambique, 2007