Jean-Michel Basquiat Wolf Sausage Series Prints For Sale

The four titles in this series, Wolf Sausage, King Brand, Untitled (Dog Leg Study) and Undiscovered Genius, come from images Jean-Michel Basquiat made in 1982 and 1983, the two years widely considered the most extraordinary stretch of his short career. It was in 1982 that his debut solo show at Annina Nosei Gallery sold out completely, he became the youngest artist ever invited to documenta in Kassel, and he was introduced to Andy Warhol, a friendship that would go on to shape the rest of the decade for both artists. The prints themselves weren't released until his estate published them decades later, giving collectors access to work from that specific window in an editioned form.

Invented brand names turn up repeatedly across Basquiat's output from this period, and King Brand and Wolf Sausage sit within that pattern, fictional products standing in for something broader about how packaging, naming and commercial language operate. Elsewhere in his work from the same years, real product references and copyright symbols get folded into paintings and prints as a way of interrogating branding itself rather than any single company, and these two invented names read as part of that same instinct, even without a documented explanation from the artist of what these specific brands were meant to evoke. Untitled (Dog Leg Study) pulls in a different direction entirely, closer to the anatomical drawing that had already produced his Anatomy portfolio the year before, a single limb studied with the same attention to bone and structure. Undiscovered Genius closes the group with a title that reads as pointed self-awareness, an artist naming the exact gap between talent and recognition just as his own career was closing that gap faster than almost anyone else's in New York at the time.

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