Jean-Michel Basquiat - Contemporary Art Day Sale London Wednesday, October 10, 2012 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Larry Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles
    Private Collection

  • Artist Biography

    Jean-Michel Basquiat

    American • 1960 - 1988

    One of the most famous American artists of all time, Jean-Michel Basquiat first gained notoriety as a subversive graffiti-artist and street poet in the late 1970s. Operating under the pseudonym SAMO, he emblazoned the abandoned walls of the city with his unique blend of enigmatic symbols, icons and aphorisms. A voracious autodidact, by 1980, at 22-years of age, Basquiat began to direct his extraordinary talent towards painting and drawing. His powerful works brilliantly captured the zeitgeist of the 1980s New York underground scene and catapulted Basquiat on a dizzying meteoric ascent to international stardom that would only be put to a halt by his untimely death in 1988.

    Basquiat's iconoclastic oeuvre revolves around the human figure. Exploiting the creative potential of free association and past experience, he created deeply personal, often autobiographical, images by drawing liberally from such disparate fields as urban street culture, music, poetry, Christian iconography, African-American and Aztec cultural histories and a broad range of art historical sources.

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130A

Untitled (crown of thorns)

circa 1982
crayon on paper
35.6 x 31.2 cm (14 x 12 1/4 in)

Estimate
£100,000 - 150,000 

Sold for £301,250

Contemporary Art Day Sale

11 October 2012
London