Michel Basquiat 50 Cent Piece
Condition reports and provenance available upon request
About This Work
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s *Michel Basquiat 50 Cent Piece* distils his signature fusion of drawing, text, and iconography into a sharp meditation on value—cultural, economic, and personal. Executed with the raw immediacy of street-derived mark-making, the work layers gestural line, fragmented notation, and emblematic symbols to evoke a coin’s promise of worth while questioning who assigns it. Basquiat’s abrasive surfaces and urgent scrawl echo the rhythms of hip-hop and downtown New York, where Black authorship, commodification, and fame collided in the 1980s. By collapsing portraiture and currency into a single visual language, the piece underscores Basquiat’s enduring critique of power, race, and the art market’s appetite for myth.
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