A New Jean-Michel Basquiat Exhibition Opens in Toronto

In Toronto, a new exhibition of limited-edition screenprints and one original drawing by neo-expressionist art wunderkind Jean-Michel Basquiat is opening at Yorkville’s Taglialatella Galleries. It’s a rare opportunity to get up close and personal with the much beloved artist’s work, which Canadian audiences haven’t had much chance to see since Now’s the Time, the major Basquiat retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2015, and Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music, the multidisciplinary music-themed showcase at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2022. Unlike those exhibitions, this one is free to attend.

Basquiat died of a heroin overdose in New York in 1988, at the age of 27. By then, he had achieved some art-world notoriety, but his legendary status has come posthumously. The prices that his works command have increased exponentially, too. In 1984, while he was alive, the painting Untitled (1982) sold for $19,000. In 2017, the same painting fetched $110.5 million at auction.

Over the nearly four decades since his death, his estate has been run by family, first by his estranged father, Gerard, and now by his younger sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, with their stepmother, Nora Fitzpatrick. The family has held on to the bulk of Basquiat’s original works (an estimated 600 paintings and 1,500 drawings) but have been very open to strategic licensing deals. Iconography lifted from Basquiat’s paintings can be found emblazoned on caps at Uniqlo, socks at Urban Outfitters, hoodies at Old Navy, and watch faces at Swatch, plus skateboards, phone cases, cat collars, and more besides.

Of course, we can’t know what the rebellious, antiestablishment artist might have felt about this. While he was closely associated with pop artist Andy Warhol, who openly embraced and worked within systems of commodification, Basquiat rooted his own practice in a ruthless interrogation of racism and capitalism, especially in how Black bodies and culture are tokenized and exploited for the commercial gain of others.

That said, the licensing of Basquiat’s artwork for brand collaborations has provided lifelong financial security for his sisters. It has kept profits concentrated in his lineage and largely out of the hands of the white elite he so distrusted.

“Our strategy is to make Jean-Michel’s art accessible through licensing,” Lisane Basquiat has said. “If a person can’t afford to purchase a painting, they can still purchase something, some physical thing that gives them the ability to have access to Jean-Michel’s artwork.”

The fact is, Basquiat’s artwork has broad appeal, and that’s precisely why it’s so commercially attractive. His signature crown emblem may have become ubiquitous on apparel and accessories, but it’s still impossible to dilute the visceral impact of a Basquiat painting. With their visual immediacy, his compositions communicate intense emotion: anger, vulnerability, humour, anxiety, ambition. You don’t need an art history degree to get what’s going on, but closer study will always reward the viewer with a deeper sense of understanding as the historical and literary references reveal themselves.

Among the works on view at Taglialatella is the newest print edition to be released by the Basquiat estate, King Alphonso (1982/2025). It references the last ruling monarch of Spain, nicknamed “El Africano,” and features a three-pointed crown that dwarfs the head it hovers over. There’s also Flexible (1984/2016), the original of which sold for $45 million (U.S.) at auction. It shows a figure with visible internal organs, another Basquiat hallmark inspired by his obsession with the Gray’s Anatomy textbook, which started after he was hit by a car as a child and had his spleen removed.

Both Phooey (1982/2021) and Hollywood Africans in Front of the Chinese Theater With Footprints of Movie Stars (1983/2015) are more than seven feet wide. Hollywood Africans is an extension of a painting housed in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Of the scratched-out phrases in these works and others, Basquiat said, “I cross out words so you will see them more; the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them.”

The ideas in Basquiat’s paintings feel no less urgent now than when they were first created, no matter how rampant the merch around them. After visiting the exhibition, a worthwhile companion is the documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, free to watch in full on YouTube. It is one of Basquiat’s only filmed interviews, made by his friend Tamra Davis two years before his death, and a fascinating window into the life and mind behind the powerful work of a singular artist.

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