Jean-Michel Basquiat - Evening & Day Editions London Wednesday, January 24, 2018 | Phillips
  • 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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204

Ligaments of the Elbow, from Anatomy

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

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Evening & Day Editions

London Auction 25 January 2018