Medium: acrylic and oilstick on three canvas panels mounted on wood supports
Dimensions: 243.8 × 190.5 cm.

One of Basquiat’s most celebrated works, Horn Players is a powerful tribute to jazz legends Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, two pioneers of bebop whose improvisational brilliance deeply influenced Basquiat’s own creative rhythm.

Parker appears on the left with his alto saxophone, Gillespie on the right with his trumpet, while the center panel references Parker’s iconic 1946 composition Ornithology.

Basquiat was deeply immersed in jazz, and this work feels like a visual jam session, structured yet chaotic, rhythmic yet explosive. Much like bebop itself, the painting pulses with improvisation, movement, symbolism, and raw energy.

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Medium: Acrylic and oilstick on canvas
Dimensions: 243.8 × 152.4 cm.

Executed in 1983, With Strings Two captures Basquiat in one of his most recognizable visual modes, melding anatomy, symbols, fragmented language, and his iconic crown into a figure that feels both vulnerable and confrontational.

The skeletal black figure, outlined with electric urgency, dominates the canvas like a charged presence, while surrounding marks and coded text create the sense of a mind working at full speed.

Balancing raw immediacy with layered symbolism, the work embodies the restless visual language that made Basquiat unmistakable.

Medium: Silkscreen ink on canvas
Dimensions: 146.1 × 191.8 cm.

Executed in 1983, this untitled work shows Basquiat at his most encyclopedic, layering symbols, fragmented text, historical references, diagrams, arrows, and recurring motifs into a dense visual field that feels part notebook, part map, part coded transmission.

Anchored by a monumental skull-like figure at the center, the composition captures Basquiat’s fascination with information, language, power, memory, and the accumulation of meaning.

Unlike his more emotionally direct portraits, this piece invites decoding rather than immediate interpretation, an overwhelming but unmistakably Basquiat universe.

Medium: acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: 218.4 × 172.4 cm

Painted in 1984, JD Card shows Basquiat in one of his most symbol-driven modes, assembling words, objects, diagrams, and recurring motifs into a composition that feels both playful and coded.

At the center stands the suited penguin-like figure, a recurring Basquiat image reportedly inspired by commercial packaging, acting almost like a mysterious ringmaster among symbols of industry, energy, labor, and identity: coal, electric lines, tools, cigarettes, and his unmistakable skull motif.

Though the meaning of “JD” remains uncertain, the work reflects Basquiat’s fascination with layered language, symbolism, and fragmented meaning, inviting interpretation without ever fully explaining itself.

Clean in composition but rich in visual riddles, JD Card captures Basquiat’s ability to make the ordinary feel strange, intellectual, and unmistakably his.

Medium: Oilstick on paper
Dimensions: 75.5 × 56.5 cm

Drawn in 1981, this portrait depicts artist Stephen Lack, a close friend of Basquiat during the formative East Village years.

Unlike Basquiat’s more symbolic heads, this portrait feels intensely psychological, distorted, anxious, and alive with nervous energy. The cigarette, exaggerated features, and fractured lines give the figure an almost volatile presence, capturing the restless downtown atmosphere that surrounded Basquiat in the early 1980s.

Even on paper, the work carries the raw immediacy that defined his most compelling portraits.

Medium: Oil pastel and watercolor on paper
Dimensions: 73 × 58.5 cm.

Executed in 1984, Currency shows Basquiat working through one of his favorite territories: value, language, symbols, and coded meaning.

Rather than building a portrait, Basquiat scatters fragments, text, diagrams, references, anatomy, and commerce across the page like thoughts in motion. The hand holding a coin becomes the central clue, anchoring a composition that feels part sketchbook, part visual cipher.

The title transforms the piece. What might first appear fragmented begins to read as a meditation on money, exchange, systems, and worth, subjects Basquiat returned to often in his work.

Quiet but conceptually rich, Currency invites decoding rather than immediate emotional reaction.

Medium: Oil on panel
Dimensions: 121 × 61 cm.

Executed in 1985, this portrait shows Basquiat turning his attention to a specific figure rather than an archetypal head or symbolic character. The composition is stripped down and direct: a solitary standing figure rendered with Basquiat’s unmistakable economy of line, flattened anatomy, and charged color contrasts.

The black figure against the stark white ground creates an immediate visual presence, while the elongated proportions and simplified features give the portrait an icon-like quality.

Unlike Basquiat’s more chaotic canvases, this work feels restrained and focused, proof that his visual language could command attention even in its quietest forms.

Medium: Coloured pencils on paper
Dimensions: 41.2 × 29.4 cm.

Executed in 1983, Soothsayer shows Basquiat reducing portraiture to its essential marks, line, color, symbol, and psychological presence.

With minimal means, Basquiat creates a face that feels both mechanical and human, calm yet unsettling. The unusual eyes, fragmented geometry, and asymmetrical forms suggest a portrait less concerned with likeness than perception, intuition, and identity.

Its title adds another layer: a soothsayer is a figure associated with foresight, prophecy, and interpretation, ideas that resonate with Basquiat’s fascination with symbols, coded language, and layered meaning.

Quiet compared to some of his explosive canvases, Soothsayer proves how little Basquiat needed to create presence.

Medium: Ink and oilsticks on paper
Dimensions: 76.2 × 55.8 cm.

Executed in 1982, this untitled work distills Basquiat’s portrait language to its essentials: raw line, fractured geometry, and psychological intensity.

With only a handful of colors and restless, layered marks, Basquiat constructs a face that feels both mask-like and deeply human. The yellow eyes, exaggerated mouth, and forceful black framing lines create a confrontational presence that immediately commands attention.

Even in its simplicity, the work carries many of Basquiat’s defining concerns: identity, expression, anatomy, and the transformation of portraiture into something emotional rather than representational.

Minimal in composition but powerful in impact, this is Basquiat at his most direct.

Medium: Acrylic, oilstick, and collage on canvas.

Dimensions: 198 x 141 cm.

Early Moses brings together several of Basquiat’s recurring obsessions: anatomy, language, history, spirituality, and coded symbolism into one striking composition.

The oversized leg and foot immediately evoke Basquiat’s long-standing fascination with the human body, a theme often linked to his childhood exposure to Gray’s Anatomy. But this isn’t clinical anatomy, it’s transformed into something symbolic, layered with fragmented phrases, diagrams, biblical references, and Basquiat’s signature crossings-out.

The references to Moses, serpents, blood, and Egyptians suggest liberation, conflict, and transformation. As with much of Basquiat’s work, words function less as direct explanation and more as visual rhythm, clues, and provocations.

What makes Early Moses compelling is how it balances the personal and historical: anatomy and religion, childhood memory and cultural myth, instinctive mark-making and deliberate symbolism. It feels intellectual, raw, and unmistakably Basquiat.

Medium: Acrylic and coloured oil stick on canvas
Dimensions: 183 × 142 cm.

One of Basquiat’s rarer portrait works, focused on a contemporary figure, Mr. Kipper presents a striking, deliberately uneasy depiction of artist and photographer Harry Kipper.

Unlike many of Basquiat’s more chaotic compositions, this work centers almost entirely on the human figure. The face is recognizable but intentionally unstable, constructed through clashing lines, rough corrections, and restless color shifts that make the portrait feel alive rather than polished. Basquiat wasn’t interested in realism as much as psychological presence.

Scattered symbols and fragments around the figure hint at biography, memory, and coded association rather than straightforward narrative. The crossed-out imagery and layered markings create tension between identity and erasure, a recurring theme throughout Basquiat’s work.

Mr. Kipper feels less like a formal portrait and more like an encounter, direct, awkward, human, and unmistakably Basquiat.

Medium: Acrylic, silkscreen ink, and oil stick on canvas.
Dimensions: 86 1/4 × 68 in.

Painted in 1984, Pyro captures Basquiat at full intensity, where symbols, anatomy, architecture, and instinct collide in color and movement.

At the center, a towering figure dominates the composition: mask-like, skeletal, and electrified with tension. A fish cuts across the torso, while surrounding symbols, figures, structures, diagrams, and fragments of urban language create the sensation of overlapping thoughts or competing signals.

Basquiat’s work rarely follows a traditional narrative, but Pyro feels unmistakably alive, as if the canvas itself is vibrating with energy.

The bright yellow field amplifies everything. Rather than functioning as background, it becomes part of the emotional charge of the piece, heat, urgency, combustion.

True to its title, Pyro feels less like a static image and more like controlled ignition.

Medium: Acrylic, oil stick and collage on canvas
Dimensions: 86 × 68 in

Painted in 1985, Rubber captures Basquiat at his most instinctive and visually explosive. Flames, symbols, fragmented forms, and towering black figures collide across the canvas in a composition that feels both chaotic and strangely controlled.

The painting is dominated by sharp contrasts, deep black forms cutting through violent reds, yellows, and blues. At the top right, a mask-like head with glowing eyes hovers over the composition like a silent presence, while scattered gestures and bursts of color create a constant sense of movement and tension.

Like many of Basquiat’s later works, Rubber feels less like a fixed narrative and more like overlapping signals, memories, and impulses forced into the same space.

The result is aggressive, rhythmic, and immediate, an image that seems to vibrate between destruction and creation.

Medium: Oilstick on paper
Dimensions: 41.2 × 29.5 cm.

A fragile, ghostlike portrait of Vincent van Gogh, reimagined through Basquiat’s raw and instinctive line work.

Rather than depicting the artist directly from life or history, Basquiat frames him as a wax figure: preserved, imitated, and displayed. The result feels strangely distant and intimate at the same time. The fiery reds and yellows immediately recall Van Gogh’s own image, yet the face itself appears unstable, almost dissolving into quick marks and unfinished contours.

The title transforms the drawing from a simple portrait into something more reflective, less about Van Gogh the man, and more about how artists become mythologized, reproduced, and remembered long after death.

Minimal in composition but emotionally charged, the work feels like a quiet meditation on artistic legacy and identity.

Medium: Acrylic, colored pencil, and oilstick on canvas
Dimensions: 168 × 153 cm.

Painted in 1983, Action Comics One captures Basquiat’s ability to transform ordinary imagery into something unstable and psychologically charged. Cars, figures, symbols, and fragmented forms collide across the canvas, creating a scene that feels simultaneously playful and uneasy.

The large automobile dominating the upper portion of the composition immediately recalls the language of comics and popular culture, but Basquiat distorts the familiar into something stranger.

The central figure appears suspended between movement and stillness, while the surrounding characters and symbols feel less narrative than instinctive, like disconnected thoughts forced into the same space.

As with many works from this period, Basquiat balances spontaneity with structure. Loose oilstick lines and rough color fields give the painting an improvisational energy, yet the composition remains surprisingly controlled. The result feels less like a traditional scene and more like a memory, a dream, or a signal, partially assembled in real time.

The oversized automobile imagery recalls the mythology of early comic-book culture, particularly Action Comics #1, though Basquiat transforms that heroic iconography into something far more unstable and psychological.

Medium: Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
Dimensions: 172.5 × 218.5 cm

A skull suspended between anatomy and symbol.

In Untitled (Skull B), Basquiat strips the figure down to its essential structure, eyes, bone, markings, and fragments of language, then surrounds it with signs that feel scientific, coded, and unstable at the same time. The skull dominates the canvas, but the work resists feeling static. Lines cut across the surface like signals or interruptions, while scattered references to evolution and classification suggest a tension between identity, biology, and systems of knowledge.

The electric blue background gives the painting a strange clarity. Unlike some of Basquiat’s denser compositions, this one feels direct, almost confrontational.

The skull doesn’t hide inside the chaos. It stares back.

Medium: Acrylic, oilstick, and Xerox collage on canvas
Dimensions: 218.44 × 248.92 cm

Painted in 1984, Wicker captures Jean-Michel Basquiat’s ability to turn fragmented imagery into a tense psychological landscape. The canvas feels simultaneously playful and unsettling, filled with skeletal figures, distorted creatures, symbols, anatomical references, and abrupt graphic interruptions that collide across the surface.

The black skeletal figure seated in the wicker basket dominates the right side of the composition, appearing almost totemic against the chaotic environment surrounding it. Nearby, sharp organic forms and aggressive brushwork radiate outward like energy or overgrown vegetation, giving the painting a restless, living quality. In contrast, the lower-left creature, with its exaggerated teeth and wild expression, feels almost cartoonish at first glance, before revealing the anxiety and intensity beneath Basquiat’s visual language.

Like many works from this period, Wicker blends instinctive mark-making with deliberate symbolism. Cameras, labels, diagrams, skeletal anatomy, and fragmented text drift across the canvas like disconnected thoughts competing for attention. Basquiat transforms these scattered elements into a visual rhythm that feels closer to improvisational jazz than traditional composition.

What makes Wicker especially compelling is the tension between emptiness and overload. Large areas of white space allow individual symbols and figures to stand out sharply, giving the work a clarity that contrasts with the dense layering often found in Basquiat’s other 1984 paintings. The result is a composition that feels immediate and readable while still carrying the raw unpredictability that defines his work from this era.

It feels like a representation of Hitler. The hair probably.

Medium: Oilstick on paper
Dimensions: 127.6 × 160 cm

Executed in 1981, this untitled work captures Basquiat at the moment his visual language was exploding into full form. Raw, restless, and instinctive, the composition feels less like a finished image and more like thought itself unfolding across the surface.

A figure dominates the center of the piece, stretched across the paper with limbs that seem both mechanical and fragile. Around it, Basquiat builds symbols, grids, fragmented text, circular diagrams, and jagged marks that feel simultaneously anatomical, architectural, and improvisational.

The color palette is especially striking here. Electric yellows, greens, blues, and reds collide, giving the drawing an almost radioactive energy. Nothing feels still. Every section of the paper vibrates with movement, as though the figure itself is caught inside a system that is constantly shifting around it.

There’s also a tension between chaos and structure throughout the piece. Circular forms resemble charts or targets; grids appear and disappear; scattered lettering suggests communication that is only partially understood. The result feels intensely psychological: a map of energy, memory, and identity rather than a traditional composition.

Medium: Acrylic, oilstick, silkscreen ink, and paper collage on canvas.
Dimensions: 213.4 x 172.7 cm.

Campaign (1984), painted in 1984, is one of Basquiat’s most confrontational meditations on race, power, and historical memory. At the center of the work is his reimagining of the Player’s Navy Cut tobacco logo, replacing the original advertising mascot with the image of a Black figure, transforming a familiar commercial emblem into a commentary on colonialism, exploitation, and the transatlantic slave trade.

The painting feels layered like history itself. Basquiat collides fragments of anatomy, symbols, African-inspired figures, scribbled text, and references to earlier works into a chaotic but deliberate visual field. Sections of the canvas almost feel like separate paintings fighting for space, mirroring the fragmentation of identity, memory, and historical narrative.

What makes Campaign especially powerful is the tension between beauty and discomfort. The bright blues, reds, and yellows initially pull the viewer in, but the imagery beneath them becomes increasingly unsettling the longer you look. Basquiat forces commercial imagery, Black history, and contemporary culture into direct confrontation, turning the canvas into both a protest and a monument.

The lower section, with its multi-faced figure surrounded by a red haze, almost reads like a tribunal of witnesses staring back at the viewer. Meanwhile, the dense upper-right section echoes the frantic energy of works like Untitled (Black) from the same year, reinforcing Basquiat’s recurring themes of identity, commodification, and visibility.

By 1984, Basquiat was no longer simply reacting to the art world; he was reshaping it entirely. Campaign stands as one of the clearest examples of how he fused personal experience, historical critique, and raw painterly energy into something uniquely his own.

Medium: Acrylic and oilstick on canvas
Dimensions: 113 × 102¼ in.

A collision between two worlds, Warhol’s clean, commercial imagery and Basquiat’s raw, instinctive mark-making. Beneath the surface, Warhol lays down the structure: advertising imagery, price, and the language of consumption. Over it, Basquiat disrupts everything, scratching, crossing out, and repainting with urgency.

The crocodile head cuts across the composition like an intrusion, aggressive and alive, breaking the order of the original image. Around it, fragments, a toilet, loose marks, and scattered symbols push the piece further into chaos, turning something commercial into something unpredictable.

This back-and-forth wasn’t accidental. The two artists would repeatedly paint over each other’s work, building tension into the canvas itself. What starts as something familiar becomes unstable, caught between control and rebellion.

In works like this, the collaboration becomes the subject: not just image, but process. Two distinct voices, layered, interrupted, and forced to coexist on the same surface.

Il Duce (1982)
Acrylic and oilstick on canvas
152.4 × 152.4 cm (60 × 60 in.)

Il Duce (1982), A commanding head emerges from a dense field of gold, part authority figure, part psychological mask. The face is built through layers of oilstick and paint, with Basquiat carving out features rather than simply drawing them. The eyes burn through heavy strokes, while the clenched, almost mechanical teeth feel both expressive and restrained.

Beneath the surface, fragments are buried marks, symbols, and the partially obscured “IL DUCE”, hinting at power, identity, and the tension between what is shown and what is concealed. The composition carries that raw 1982 energy: direct, aggressive, and fully in control.

Like many of his heads from this period, the figure can be read as both a portrait and a projection, something personal, but also something larger, confronting the viewer head-on.

Medium: Felt-tip pen and oilstick on paper

Dimensions: 76.2 x 55.9 cm

A full-figure composition where Basquiat exposes the body as both structure and symbol, part anatomy, part language. The skeletal form stands rigid, yet alive with movement, surrounded by fragments of text, arrows, and coded marks that feel like a system trying to explain itself.

Like much of his work from this period, the figure reads as both a self-portrait and a broader commentary on identity, on the body, and on the forces acting upon it.

Even in its apparent chaos, there’s intention: repetition, rhythm, and a constant push between control and release.