Jean-Michel Basquiat Anatomy Series Prints For Sale

Anatomy was Jean-Michel Basquiat's first print portfolio, eighteen screenprints made in 1982 in the basement studio Annina Nosei Gallery gave him after his debut solo exhibition there that March. Before he was showing in New York galleries at all, Basquiat had spent the late 1970s writing cryptic, poetic graffiti across downtown Manhattan under the tag SAMO, alongside collaborator Al Diaz, and by 1981 his work had already appeared in the MoMA PS1 exhibition New York/New Wave, meaning his rise from anonymous street writer to gallery artist with his own solo show happened in barely two years. Basquiat printed Anatomy with Jo Watanabe in New York, in an edition of 18 plus 7 artist's proofs, and the source material traces back further still, to his own childhood: his mother gave him a copy of Gray's Anatomy when he was seven, while he was recovering in hospital after being hit by a car, and he began drawing from its diagrams during that recovery.

The anatomical fascination behind this series wasn't invented for the print portfolio either. Basquiat had already been producing hundreds of drawings and paintings built around skulls and skeletons from as early as 1981, so by the time Anatomy arrived the following year, the imagery had become one of the most consistent threads running through his early work. Here it takes its most stripped-down, diagrammatic form yet: skulls, femurs, elbows, the scapula, the pelvis, each rendered as a stark white line drawing against a solid black ground, giving the prints an X-ray-like reversal of figure and ground, with every part hand-labelled the way a medical illustration would be.

That clinical treatment sits in real contrast to the loose, expressive, text-dense paintings Basquiat is best known for from the same period, though the interest in language and the body that runs through Anatomy would keep resurfacing across his career in less literal forms. Coming right after his first major gallery show, the series captures Basquiat working through a specific, sourced body of imagery at a moment when his career was accelerating faster than almost any other young artist's in New York at the time, still only twenty-one or twenty-two years old and already producing work now studied and collected at an institutional level.

For more information or to buy Jean-Michel Basquiat Anatomy prints, contact our specialists via info@alexyellop.com. Explore more Jean-Michel Basquiat prints for sale or find out more about selling your Basquiat prints.