JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, MANNER OF: DUSTHEADS

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, MANNER OF: DUSTHEADS
This lot consists of an unframed oil painting on stretched canvas, done in the style of street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (American, 1960-1988). Image depicts two grinning, skeletal figures. A hand-painted inscription in the lower left reads, "Basquiat". A guaranteed highlight to any collection of modern art. The back of the canvas is marked "SAMO" beneath a three pointed crown. It bears a stamp reading "ministerio de cultura."

Jean-Michel Basquiat was active/lived in New York. He is known for street-graffiti, naive figure painting, drawing. He first achieved fame as part of SAMO, an informal graffiti duo who wrote enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the late 1970s where the hip hop, punk, and street art movements had coalesced. He is considered a major contributor to the neo-expressionist movement, a late-modernist style of art characterized by intense subjectivity and rough handling of materials. Basquiat used his paintings as a means of social commentary/criticism, often making attacks on power structures and systems of racism and focusing on dichotomies like wealth vs. poverty, integration vs. segregation and inner vs. outer experience.