The Figure Portfolio by Jean-Michel Basquiat is a suite of five large-format screenprints drawn from works made in 1982 — the year Basquiat moved from Annina Nosei's basement studio on Prince Street, where he had been working in conditions that amounted to supervised production, into his own space on Crosby Street, and began making some of the most physically immediate work of his career. The figures that run through this portfolio belong to that moment of expansion — bodies that fill their sheets, drawn with the speed and freedom of someone who had just been given room to move.

Each of the five prints centres on a single standing figure surrounded by the dense accumulation of marks, text, symbols, and notation that characterised Basquiat's working method at full velocity. Crowns, grids, triangles, and repeated letterforms crowd the surrounding image, the figures emerging from and pressing against this density rather than being isolated from it. These are not portraits. They are presences — assembled from colour, line, and the residue of a working process that left everything visible.

Basquiat's figures from this period drew on sources as different as African masks, anatomical diagrams, comic book characters, and the street imagery he had grown up absorbing in Brooklyn — and the paintings that resulted were unlike anything else being made in New York in 1982, operating simultaneously as expressionist painting, graphic notation, and cultural argument. The critic Rene Ricard wrote about Basquiat that year in Artforum, describing him as a "radiant child" — a phrase that followed him for the rest of his life and which he was never entirely comfortable with, sensing in it the same impulse to categorise and contain that his work was consistently pushing back against. The Figure Portfolio, published by Flatiron Editions in 2023, brings five of those figures into print at a scale — 48 by 32 inches each — that does justice to their original ambition.

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