From 25 September 2027 to 23 January 2028, Palazzo Strozzi presents a major exhibition dedicated to Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of the most significant figures of twentieth-century art. The project offers a new reading of his work, exploring the artist’s relationship with art history and with Italy’s historical and cultural heritage, from antiquity to the Renaissance.
Born in Brooklyn to a Puerto Rican mother and a Haitian father, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) began his artistic career at a very young age in late-1970s New York, through textual and poetic interventions in public spaces, signing his work as SAMO. Within just a few years, he established himself as a leading figure on the international art scene, becoming one of the most influential and recognizable artists of twentieth-century contemporary art and developing an original artistic language in which words, signs, symbols, and figures intertwine in dense compositions inspired by urban culture and contemporary life.
The exhibition in Florence brings together more than 60 works from major international public and private collections, placing particular emphasis on Basquiat’s connection with Italy, understood both as a source of cultural and iconographic influences and as a destination he visited several times throughout his life.
