BASQUIAT MURALS

Two new Banksy murals appeared in London, ahead of the upcoming exhibition at Barbican Centre dedicated to Jean-Michel Basquiat. It was confirmed by the artist himself both on his Instagram account and his website, as Banksy does usually.

This was how Banksy introduced his two new stencils painted on walls at the Barbican Center in London.

Major new Basquiat show opens at the Barbican. A place that is normally very keen to clean any graffiti from its walls.

Basquiat Welcomed by the Metropolitan Police

The first mural, that we entitled Basquiat Welcomed by the Metropolitan Police, portrays two police officers strip-searching a figure, most probably Basquiat himself, represented as a graffiti artist, with his dog. This mural is largely inspired from Basquiat's famous 1982 painting Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump, as the dog looks on.

Is this the scenario that Basquiat would have encountered as a black artist had he stayed alive?

Ferris Wheel

The Ferris Wheel mural is a strong statement on the exhibition and even possibly a mocking of it, as it depicts a Ferris wheel made up of the motif of a crown, very often used by Basquiat, while people queue up for a ticket at a booth underneath. Basquiat used the crown to symbolize his personal heroes and icons, be it musicians, athletes or writers, but he also portrayed himself wearing the same crown as well.

Basquiat at the Barbican Center, London

The exhibition proved to be the most successful in 35 years of art shows at the Barbican with 216,389 visitors. Many of them also looked at the Banksy works, and it also got extra publicity because of the Banksy mural.

The Barbican Centre Board agreed to a long-term strategy to protect the street level murals on the side of the Barbican Exhibition Centre. They have been protected with Perspex.

During the exhibition, it swiftly arranged security, for fear that City cleaning teams might erase the mural. The US artist Danny Minnick subsequently added his own work.