As the art world packs up from London and descends on Paris for art week, Opera Gallery in the French capital has mounted a show that puts friendship at the centre of one of late-20th-century art's most famous triangles. 'Warhol, Basquiat and Haring. Une amitié artistique' gathers paintings and works on paper by Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, tracing how three artists from different generations converged on the same project: breaking down the barriers between performance and painting, and between street culture and the gallery.

The exhibition's premise, laid out by the gallery's Paris director Marion Petitdidier, is that the trio recognised in each other a shared drive to bottle the energy of their moment without sanding down their individuality. The narrative moves from Warhol's late-1970s interest in the downtown New York scene — where an 18-year-old Basquiat reportedly sold him a postcard collage for a single dollar — through the mentor-like bond that renewed Warhol's engagement with painting, and on to Haring, whose own friendship with Warhol, the gallery argues, helped him imagine what it meant to be an artist reaching far beyond gallery walls.

Where the show claims to offer something new is in its handling of Haring. The Warhol–Basquiat axis has been heavily mined — most recently in Fondation Louis Vuitton's 2023 blockbuster — but Opera Gallery positions Haring as an active third force in the exchange, not a satellite. The hang zeroes in on the trio's shared language of signs and symbols: a 1983 Basquiat canvas of Batman sits in the orbit of an early-1980s Haring Mickey Mouse sketch and Warhol's 1979 'Multicolored Retrospective (Reversal series)', which folds three of his most recognisable motifs into one canvas.

A tellingly awkward 1985 photograph of the three men, stiffly posed for the camera, anchors the catalogue cover — a reminder that the chemistry was real even when the public image was strained. The exhibition runs at Opera Gallery, Paris, from 16 October to 18 November 2026.