Wolf Sausage by Jean-Michel Basquiat places a snarling wolf's head at the centre of an image that moves outward into currency, folklore, food production, comics, and the language of American coinage — LIBERTY and IN GOD WE TRUST repeated across the left, DA VINCI noted in the upper corner, COMICS CODE along the lower register, PROSCIUTTO and SAUSAGE© annotated below the wolf. The title names the transformation that is the work's subject: from wolf to sausage, from something feral and alive to something processed, packaged, and sold.

Basquiat was consistently drawn to the moment at which something with its own identity — an animal, an athlete, an artist, a culture — enters the mechanisms of commodity and comes out the other side as a product. The wolf is BAD WOLF, labelled and contained, its aggression registered but domesticated by the frame around it. The sausage below it is copyrighted. That © is doing the same work it does throughout Basquiat's output from this period: marking the point at which a thing stops belonging to itself and starts belonging to whoever owns the trademark.

Wolf Sausage is one of four works in a portfolio alongside King Brand, Untitled (Dog Leg Study), and Undiscovered Genius — a group that collectively moves between anatomy, labour, cultural production, and the economics of value. Basquiat made the original painting in 1982 and 1983, during the period of his closest collaboration with Andy Warhol — two artists from entirely different backgrounds who had arrived at the same obsession: what the market does to the thing it celebrates, and whether anything survives the process intact.

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