Hip-Hop superstar and business mogul Jay-Z, born Shawn Corey Carter, is slated to perform at the Jean Michel Basquiat X Andy Warhol exhibit in Paris. Organized by the Louis Vuitton Foundation, this will be Hov’s first live set since his 2018 co-headlining On The Run Tour II with Beyoncé.
Titled “Painting Four Hands”, the exhibition honours Basquiat & Andy Warhol’s collaborative body of works. Between 1984 and 1985, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) and Andy Warhol (1928-1987) created around 160 paintings together in tandem, “à quatre mains”, including some of the largest works produced during their respective careers.
Jay-Z isn’t unfamiliar with rare influential artworks. The Brooklyn-born rapper purchased the Basquiat painting Mecca (1982) in 2013 at Sotheby’s for a massive $4.2 million. The work depicts a New York landscape with the word “Empire” scrawled across the top, underneath the artist’s signature crown.
In fact, Complex estimated the net worth of Jay-Z’s art collection in 2013. As per its report, Jigga owns various artworks by marquee European painters including Damien Hirst, Hebru Brantley, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Mark Rothko, Francis Bacon, Ed Ruscha and Basquiat. Further, Jay Z owns Warhol’s Rorschach artworks estimated at over $10 Million.
For art historians, the far-reaching collaboration between Warhol & Basquiat evoked New York’s downtown art scene of the 1980s. The Louis Vuitton Foundation described the impact of Basquiat and Warhol’s collaborative efforts via a press release. “Basquiat × Warhol. Painting four hands is the most important exhibition ever dedicated to this extraordinary body of work and brings together more than three hundred works and documents including eighty canvases jointly signed by the two artists,” the foundation said in a statement.
Besides Basquiat and Warhol, the exhibition will feature individual bodies of works from numerous major artists including Futura 2000, Michael Halsband, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer and Kenny Scharf.
Notably, Painting Four Hands celebrates the relationship between Jean Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. “Basquiat admired Warhol as an elder, a key art world personality, and the pioneer of a new language and of a groundbreaking relationship to pop culture. Warhol, in turn, found in Basquiat a renewed interest in painting. Thanks to him, he went back to painting manually on a very large scale,” LV said in a statement.
Look out for Jay-Z‘s Celebration Concert at Jean Michel Basquiat X Andy Warhol Painting Four Hands on April 14th 2023.
Listen to Jay-Z’s influential rap records referencing the greatest artists of our times here.
Here’s how Hov does it (as heard on ‘The Story of O.J.’ from Jay-Z’s thirteenth LP 4:44).
