Odours of Punt by Jean-Michel Basquiat takes its title from one of ancient Egypt's most mythologised trade relationships — the Land of Punt, known in Egyptian records as "God's Land," a source of myrrh, frankincense, gold, and ivory whose exact location remains disputed to this day. MYRRH appears in the work itself, anchoring the title in the image's content. Punt was not simply a trading partner but a sacred origin point in Egyptian cosmology, the place from which the gods were said to come — and the odours it produced were the smell of religious ritual, of embalming, of the passage between the living and the dead.

Basquiat was drawn throughout his career to ancient civilisations as a counter-history — evidence that the cultures Western institutions marginalised had their own deep intellectual and spiritual lineages long before European contact. To invoke Punt in 1983, alongside VENUS, BIRD OF GOD, anatomical notation, and references to mystical philosophy, is to build an image in which trade, spirituality, and the body are understood as parts of the same continuous inquiry rather than separate disciplines.

This screenprint is among his most physically immediate — dense blue marks applied in broad sweeping strokes cover much of the image, with collaged and Xeroxed text fragments visible beneath and alongside the gestural marks. Basquiat used the Xerox process throughout this period to embed existing documents — his own drawings, medical texts, commercial imagery — into the work, so that the distinction between an original mark and a reproduced one became part of the argument. In a work about trade and the movement of goods and knowledge across vast distances, that collapse between original and copy is not incidental.

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