AREA Club NYC
"Complimentary Admission/Invitation Ticket", 1985
AREA Club NYC, May 8th 1985, 11 pm, 157 Hudson Street NYC, Photo: Michael Halsband at Mr. Chow’s, Lithograph on card stock, 8 x 10 in. (25.4 × 20.3 cm)
Condition:
Very good- non faded, folded 3 times (see pics).
Provenance:
Private Collection, NY
VINCE fine arts, Miami
Note:
The 1980’s answer, perhaps, to the 1951 photograph of “The Irascibles” appearing in Life magazine, Michael Halsband’s decade-defining image of New York artists is printed here in its original reception context: a vintage invitation to the nightclub, Area, on May 8, 1985. Area was recently chronicled by the New York Times as “the nightclub-as-art-gallery that came to define the creative hedonism of 1980s New York.” Apart from this, Basquiat, wearing a bow-tie in the group portrait, wryly marks his own place within the matrix of race, class, and power in the 1980s artworld: as the only black man in the photo, he holds a plate, posing as a server. Printed in an unknown edition size. Every picture tells a story.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente, Jenny Holzer, Larry Rivers, David Hockney, Alex Katz, Marisol, Tom Wesselmann, Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, John Chamberlain, Sol LeWitt, Kenny Scharf, Jennifer Losch Bartlett |