Jean-Michel Basquiat Daros Suite Prints For Sale |

The Daros Suite prints, Leeches, Ascent, Olympic and Liberty, are four drawings pulled from a much larger group Jean-Michel Basquiat made in 1982 and 1983, thirty-two works on paper now housed together at the Daros Collection in Zurich, which is where the series takes its name. Not every drawing from that original group of thirty-two has surfaced as a print at the same time. King Brand, for instance, comes from that same body of work but was released separately by the estate in a different portfolio years later, and the two groups share more than just an origin: the same pests that crawl through Leeches turn up again in Wolf Sausage, and Olympic's reference to Walt Disney sits directly beneath an image of the Big Bad Wolf from that other print, suggesting Basquiat was working across these thirty-two sheets as a connected body of imagery rather than thirty-two isolated ideas.

Olympic carries the clearest historical weight of the four, built around the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where Jesse Owens set world records competing in front of Adolf Hitler and a regime built on white supremacy. Swastikas sit alongside labelled diagrams of the athlete's body, an image of Black excellence staged directly against the politics trying hardest to deny it, the same territory Basquiat returned to a year later in Hollywood Africans. Basquiat's signature three-pointed crown, so central to so much of his other work, appears only once across this entire group of four, twice within Olympic itself, positioned above a Superman logo near a sports car and a bar of soap. Ascent moves into different territory entirely, an angelic figure rising through imagery of resurrection and collapse, name-checking the real philosophers Eckartshausen and Plotinus and building a tension between spiritual transcendence and destruction that Leeches approaches from the opposite direction, parasites and anatomical diagrams standing in for something closer to civilisation under threat from forces it can't fully control.

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