Record-Breaking $110.5 M. Basquiat Painting To Go On View In Miami

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Pérez Art Museum Miami to Mount Basquiat Exhibition Drawn From Kenneth C. Griffin Collection

A small group of Jean-Michel Basquiat works rarely seen together is heading to the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) this summer, anchored by a canvas that once rewrote the artist's auction history.

The museum announced that“Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols” will open June 25, 2026, bringing together about 10 works by American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) from the collection of Kenneth C. Griffin. The presentation comprises nine paintings and one sculpture, and is supported by Griffin through his Griffin Catalyst initiative.

PAMM director Franklin Sirmans, who co-curated a major traveling Basquiat exhibition that debuted at the Brooklyn Museum in 2005, is organizing the show with Megan Kincaid, the museum's collection curator. According to the museum, the exhibition will focus on Basquiat's use of enduring pictorial concerns - portraiture and the figure, script and language - alongside what it described as his conceptual intensification of color, form, and composition.

“At PAMM, this exhibition feels both inevitable and vital,” Sirmans said in a statement, pointing to Miami's“layered histories, diasporic communities, and global outlook” as a particularly resonant setting for Basquiat's imagery, which he described as rooted in“memory, migration, and cultural hybridity.”

Among the loans is“Untitled (1982),” the painting that set Basquiat's current auction record when it sold for $110.5 million at Sotheby's in May 2017. Kenneth C. Griffin did not acquire the work at that sale; it was purchased then by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who had also bought another 1982 Basquiat,“Untitled (Devil),” for $57.3 million the previous year. Maezawa later sold“Untitled (1982)” to Griffin in 2024, reportedly for $200 million.

The checklist also includes“Untitled (Tenant)” (1982), described by the museum as depicting a distorted, skeletal figure;“Pez Dispenser” (1984), featuring the familiar candy mechanism; and“In Italian” (1983), which PAMM characterized as operating simultaneously as portrait, study, linguistic puzzle, and autobiographical document - and as reflecting Basquiat's engagement with Italian Renaissance anatomical investigation.

Sirmans framed the exhibition as an invitation to look past Basquiat's celebrity and market stature.“This is a compelling moment to revisit Jean-Michel Basquiat not as a market phenomenon or pop icon, but as a rigorous, self-taught master of painting and form,” he said, adding that the museum hopes visitors will“slow down” and“look closely” at works“rarely seen in depth.”

PAMM is also positioning the show within a summer when Miami expects an influx of international visitors for the FIFA World Cup. The city will host seven matches, including the third-place play-off, with three group-stage games scheduled before the exhibition opens.

“As Miami prepares to welcome a global audience for the FIFA World Cup, Pérez Art Museum Miami offers an extraordinary opportunity to experience visual art from across the Americas,” Griffin said in a statement. He added that he is“proud to partner with PAMM” to present works by Basquiat, describing the artist's ability to connect“across communities and generations.”

With a tightly focused selection and a headline work whose provenance tracks the last decade of Basquiat's market ascent,“Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols” is poised to test a familiar question in museum culture: what changes when an artist known everywhere is encountered slowly, in person, and at scale - in a city built on movement, exchange, and reinvention.

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