Michel Basquiat Jawbone of an Ass
Condition reports and provenance available upon request
About This Work
In *Jawbone of an Ass*, Jean‑Michel Basquiat fuses raw painterly urgency with encyclopaedic sampling, transforming the biblical title into a contemporary allegory of power, violence, and survival. Built through rapid mark-making, scrawled text, and fractured anatomy, the work channels Basquiat’s signature neo‑expressionist vocabulary: a streetwise palimpsest where gesture, symbol, and language collide. His use of abrasive line, improvised iconography, and charged negative space recalls both graffiti’s immediacy and art history’s hierarchies, collapsing “high” and “low” culture with radical fluency. Culturally, the piece speaks to Black identity, institutional critique, and the mythologies of American heroism—positioning Basquiat’s visual poetics as a lasting force in contemporary art.
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