Flexible by Jean-Michel Basquiat centres on a single figure — a dark, mask-like head with yellow eyes and exposed teeth, the torso built from white anatomical line, the whole form encircled by a looping red contour that descends from the top of the image and rises back up the left side, enclosing the body without quite containing it. Horizontal ruled lines run across the entire image, placing the figure in something that reads as a record — a page, a ledger, a surface designed for classification.

The gap between the title and what the image shows is where Basquiat's argument lives. Flexible is not what the figure looks like — it appears under pressure, the red loop drawing the body inward, the neck extended and strained, the teeth bared in an expression closer to endurance than ease. Throughout his career Basquiat was drawn to the distance between the names given to things and what those things actually are, and a body described as flexible is a body that can be bent to requirements, its adaptation understood as a quality rather than a condition imposed from outside.

Basquiat made the original work in 1984, at the height of his collaboration with Andy Warhol and in the months leading up to their joint exhibition at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in September 1985 — a show that drew some of the harshest reviews either artist had received, with the New York Times critic Vivien Raynor dismissing Basquiat as "Warhol's mascot." The fallout hit Basquiat harder than Warhol, and he left New York hurt and withdrawn. The figure in this screenprint — encircled, ruled, anatomically notated, bent without breaking — belongs to that moment and the pressures that produced it.

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