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.
1982 Screenprint, on Arches 88 paper, with full margins. I. 75.6 x 56 cm (29 3/4 x 22 in.) S. 76.6 x 57 cm (30 1/8 x 22 1/2 in.) Signed in pencil on the front and numbered '16/1' in pencil on the reverse, from the edition of 18 numbered consecutively on the reverse (there were also 7 artist's proofs in Roman numerals), published by Annina Nosei Gallery, New York, framed.
Estimate £7,000 - 10,000
Sold for £20,000
Contact Specialist Robert Kennan
Head of Editions, Europe
London
+44 207 318 4075
