ArtInfo has more about Alexis Adler, a one-time girlfriend of Jean-Michel Basquiat. In 1979, he "began transforming" her East Village apartment into "a living installation," including a wall mural featuring Olive Oyl. While the couple broke up a year later, Adler, one of the two supervisors of the Embryology Laboratory at NYU, never painted over his work.We'll let ArtInfo pick up the narrative:
Obviously that turned out to be a wise decision — as was storing his notebooks, postcards, painted clothes, photographs, and drawings on yellow legal paper. Thirty years later, Adler has now begun to assemble a team of advisors to help sort through the material in preparation for a book on the collection and, in all likelihood, an exhibition and sale. "Part of the issue has been that I am a working biologist who has raised two kids on my own and have not had time or energy to deal with it," Adler said. "Now is the time, however."
Adler, who owns the apartment, is having someone from Fine Art Restoration refurnish and remove the wall... and is enlisting Basquiat’s former assistant, Stephen Torton, to rep her in any possible future sales.
Regardless, Adler is in no hurry. She says she is financially secure and has already waited 30 years, after all. "I just want to show it," she said. Her two children are now grown and she has a boyfriend who lives uptown, which means that these days her cats are the main witnesses to the mural. "And that’s a damn shame," she said, "because it’s a beautiful piece of art."
You can read the whole ArtInfo post here.
Basquiat died in 1988 at age 27.
[Image via Wikipedia Commons]
Was in Adler's apartment a number of years ago for a party - was quite blown away to see the Basquiats painted on the walls, hidden behind doorways, in the kids' rooms, etc - all over the place. Should make for a good story.
ReplyDeleteMs.Adler is a great person, and it is fortunate someone as sensitive and kind was left to preserve his work. Amazing in our world of money driven opportunists , many kudos to A.A.
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