The Barbican’s ‘Basquiat: Boom for Real’ exhibition covers the life and career of New York-based artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. It demystifies his working process, explores the various stages in the development of his artistic practice, as well as his collaborations and relations with fellow artists and musicians. It was compelling to learn about the diversity and fluidity of his practice, working across a range of media, from poetry, performance, music and Xerox art to paintings, drawings and objects.

It was fascinating to better understand his working process, both in and out of the studio – he would surround himself with source material, drawing inspiration from books scattered around him on the floor to the sounds of the television or boom box. As the writer Glenn O’Brien commented, ‘he ate up every image, every word, every bit of data that appeared in front of him’ and ‘processed’ and ‘synthesized’ this all into his work.

The exhibition also revealed the extensive selection of source material from which Basquiat drew his ideas and content, particularly in the ‘Notebooks’ and ‘Encyclopaedia’ rooms. I found this allowed me to deconstruct his large mural-like paintings and altered the way in which I actually perceived his work. It was particularly intriguing to see pages of his notebooks and contextualise the role played by text in his work, as well as its musicality and rhetoric.