Back at Basquiat!

Last week I bought flights to London for Sat 27th of Jan as I planned on us visiting Boom For Real for a second time.

It was a bit silly but after booking the flights I went to get tickets on the Barbican website where I then discovered they were sold out!!!  Aagh!

I emailed the Barbican Centre to see if there was a wait list for cancelled tickets. They told me there was no cancellation list but there would be a small amount of tickets released on the day.

And so yesterday we flew to London and arrived at 8.40am and dashed to the Barbican on the Heathrow Express and tube.

We got there at 10.10am to discover a HUGE queue with easily over 300 people ahead of us.

After waiting in line for over an hour and a half it was hard to see if we were going to get in. There was very little movement and they were only letting in a handful of people every 15 mins. And although they were open until very late with entry up to 10pm, we had a flight in the evening so we were somewhat restricted by the latest time we could go in at.

We heard someone ahead of us mention that if you joined as a member there was an opportunity to get tickets for this exhibition as they had a different batch set aside for members.

Leaving Ciaran in the queue I went inside to suss out membership and see if they still had tickets available.

There was another line to set up membership along with ticket pickup for members so I got in to this and when I got to the top I was advised that if we joined as members we could get tickets for a 2.30pm entry.  I jumped at the opportunity! After travelling all the way from Ireland, it would have been a big disappointment to not get to see the show. 2.30pm was also the perfect time as we had plans to go visit a gallery in another area of London where we also planned to have something eat. We could then return, see the show and then head directly to the airport at about 4pm for our flight home just after 6pm. It was perfect!

And now we are members of the Barbican Centre we can get lots of other benefits on future visits.

The exhibition was just as good if not better on the second visit as on the first. The only thing is that I find Basquiat's art so immense that once I have seen a few of his works I begin to feel overwhelmed. So in actual fact I would choose to visit a third time if that was possible.  But of course it is not possible as it has closed now.

Hopefully it will open in another country and with any luck I will get to see it there!

I had hoped to buy some postcards of Basquiat prints but they were all sold out. However, I did buy my twin sister a little gift to say thanks for minding our dog while we were gone for the day - I got her this cute little enamel Basquiat crown pin. Thanks Amy!