Gary Nader Art Centre
Acquires a Significant Work
by Jean-Michel Basquiat
The work will be featured in 'LAM BASQUIAT SONGYE', opening this November in Miami
A Collection Built on Two Pillars
Gary Nader Art Centre is the acquisition of a significant work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, which will be featured in ‘LAM BASQUIAT SONGYE’: Wifredo Lam & Jean-Michel Basquiat in Dialogue with the Songye Sculpture of Central Africa, opening in November 2026 in Miami.
At the center of this announcement is Basquiat’s Figure 3A, executed in 1984. Created in acrylic and oilstick on canvas, the painting belongs to a pivotal period in the artist’s career and stands as a powerful example of the raw intensity, symbolic force, and commanding figuration that define some of his most enduring works.
With its frontal, almost totemic presence, Figure 3A distills a singular tension between gesture, symbol, and the human figure that resonates both with Basquiat’s visual imagination and with Wifredo Lam’s hybrid, ritual, and visionary universe, unfolding within this exhibition a particularly revealing dialogue with the spiritual and formal force of Songye sculpture.
The acquisition significantly expands the scope of ‘LAM BASQUIAT SONGYE’, an ambitious exhibition that places two of the twentieth century’s most consequential artists in conversation with one of Central Africa’s most powerful sculptural traditions.
In this context, Figure 3A emerges not only as a major Basquiat painting, but also as a key entry point into the exhibition’s central themes of ancestry, transformation, presence, and the charged intersection between the visible and the invisible.
The importance of the work is further reflected in both its provenance and its distinguished publication and exhibition history. Formerly held in a private collection in Monaco, Figure 3A has appeared in major Basquiat references published between 1989 and 2005 and has been exhibited internationally in cities including Paris, Kaohsiung, Taichung, Seoul, Tokyo, Marugame, São Paulo, Naples, and Klagenfurt.
Opening in November 2026, with the exact date to be announced, ‘LAM BASQUIAT SONGYE’ will offer audiences a renewed opportunity to encounter Basquiat and Lam through a lens that is at once formal, spiritual, and art historically expansive.
ABOUT GARY NADER ART CENTRE
Founded by Gary Nader and headquartered in Miami’s vibrant Wynwood Arts District, is among the Americas’ preeminent and most regarded art galleries specializing in Latin American, Modern and Contemporary Masters. With over four decades of experience in the acquisition, exhibition, and scholarly promotion of major international artists, the gallery has mounted landmark exhibitions featuring the work some of he most important artists worldwide including Fernando Botero, Rufino Tamayo, Roberto Matta, Pablo Picasso, Matisse, Frank Stella, Diego Rivera, to name a few.
With a permanent inventory of over 2000 important works Gary Nader Art Centre maintains deep institutional relationships with major museums, auction houses, and private collections internationally, and is recognized as a primary authority on the work of Wifredo Lam.
The gallery is committed to the serious contextual and art-historical framing of the works it presents, and to the recognition of Latin America artistic traditions as central — not peripheral — to the history of modern and contemporary art worldwide.
