To Repel Ghosts: Important Works by Jean-Michel Basquiat from the Collection of Matt Dike
151Ο
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Untitled (Red/Black Figure)
- Estimate
- $400,000 - 600,000
$400,000
Lot Details
oilstick on Arches paper
22 x 19 1/2 in. (55.9 x 49.5 cm.)
Executed in 1982.
Specialist
Full-Cataloguing
Provenance
Jean-Michel Basquiat
American | B. 1960 D. 1988One 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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