A Sparkling Tribute to Basquiat
Why Dom Pérignon chose to pair its 2015 vintage with an iconic New York artist.
For twenty years Champagne house Dom Pérignon has been collaborating with icons from the artistic worlds, "to stay in phase with utmost contemporary creation."
Past muses include Andy Warhol, Karl Lagerfeld, Lenny Kravitz, Jeff Koons and Lady Gaga. This week Dom Pérignon held an event at The Brand Art Foundation Art Study Center, New York, to celebrate its latest partnership, this time with the estate of legendary artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, an iconoclast at the forefront of the neo-expressionist and the American street art movement.
The East Village location was particularly meaningful. Basquiat resided there early on in his life as an artist, during which time he met his friend for life, Andy Warhol, when Basquiat was selling postcards to make a living.
Basquiat said he conceived much of his work as the expression of a state of mind at a given moment, which the Champagne house pointed out in the work on display at The Foundation, where members of his family were gathered to mark the occasion.
"The assemblage of materials and the successive pictorial interventions that hide each other until what was originally painted becomes indecipherable, opens the way to potentially infinite layers of meaning and multiple emotional configurations for the observer," it said.
There is a pleasing dualism between Basquiat's iconic crown emblem- a symbol of power - and the symbolic shield on the bottle label of Dom Pérignon. In heraldic tradition, the shield evokes the defense of a place and its community.
It also designates the support on which the sign of a House is inscribed. For Dom Pérignon, it testifies both to the attachment to the original territory of Hautvillers and to the ambition of Dom Pérignon to assert its uniqueness.
"Basquiat was not necessarily in search of a masterpiece, but of expressive power. It is the same for Dom Pérignon, whose ambition is to inspire the world to elevation through the creation of unique Vintages," the Champagne house said.
