Michel Basquiat Riddle Me Portfolio
Condition reports and provenance available upon request
About This Work
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s *Michel Basquiat Riddle Me Portfolio* distils the artist’s electric visual language into a concentrated suite of images, where drawing, text, and symbol collide with urgent clarity. Rendered with the raw immediacy of his mark-making—jagged line, abrupt colour, and scrawled annotation—the portfolio advances Basquiat’s ongoing negotiation between street-born expression and art-historical critique. Motifs of anatomy, crowns, and fractured portraiture function like visual riddles: part provocation, part testimony, inviting viewers to decode power, identity, and authorship. The serial format amplifies his rhythm and repetition, allowing themes to reverberate across sheets like sampled beats. Both incisive and visceral, the work stands as a potent example of Basquiat’s capacity to transform graffiti-inflected gesture into enduring contemporary iconography.
About the Artist
Jean-Michel Basquiat ( BAH-skee-AH(T), French: [ʒɑ̃ miʃɛl baskja]; December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was an American artist who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the neo-expressionism movement. Basquiat first achieved notoriety in the late 1970s as part of the graffiti duo SAMO, alongsi...
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Contemporary Art • Hampstead, London
Established 1976 • 50 years of excellence in contemporary art • Professional authentication and provenance research