Gravestone - Jean-Michel Basquiat
Archival giclée
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Description
A powerful 1987 triptych by Jean-Michel Basquiat, featuring raw, gestural marks on found wooden doors that explore themes of mortality and urban decay.
Jean-Michel Basquiat created Gravestone in 1987, utilising found materials to construct a triptych-like arrangement. The work consists of three wooden door panels hinged together, providing a physical structure that departs from the traditional flat canvas. Basquiat applies acrylic paint and oilstick directly onto the wood, allowing the grain and texture of the doors to remain visible beneath his marks.
The composition features recurring motifs found throughout Basquiat's oeuvre. On the left panel, a stark black flower stands beside a yellow cross, symbols that evoke themes of mortality and spiritual reflection. The central panel bears the word PERISHABLE, scrawled in a raw, aggressive hand that recalls the artist's early experience as a street writer. This text is partially obscured by energetic, gestural black lines, creating a sense of urgency and decay. The right panel displays a skull-like mask, rendered in red, white, and black, which functions as a memento mori. The use of hinges to connect the panels suggests a portable or folding altar, further grounding the piece in the tradition of religious iconography while subverting it through the lens of urban decay and consumer culture.
Basquiat's application of paint is immediate and unrefined. He prioritises raw expression over technical precision, using bold colours and jagged lines to convey psychological weight. The choice of discarded doors as a support medium reflects his interest in the detritus of the city, transforming everyday objects into vehicles for personal and social commentary. This work captures the tension between the permanence of death and the fleeting nature of existence, themes that occupied much of his output during the late 1980s. The physical presence of the doors forces the viewer to confront the work as an object in space rather than a window into a scene.
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Each print is produced to order using 12-colour giclée printing on FSC-certified archival paper. Designed in Britain and printed at your nearest production hub to reduce waste and speed up delivery.
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Specific Features
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- Frames in black, natural wood, dark wood or white
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Museum-grade giclée on FSC-certified archival matte paper, with framed and canvas options.
- Paper sizes: A4, A3, A2, A1, A0 and B2 (50×70 cm)
- Canvas: XS (20×30 cm) to Large (60×90 cm)
- Frames: black, natural wood, dark wood or white
Gravestone - Jean-Michel Basquiat
Artist Biography
Jean Michel Basquiat
He had no formal art training. He dropped out of school at seventeen and slept on park benches and friends' floors. He sold hand-painted postcards and t-shirts. He gate-crashed a restaurant where the critic Henry Geldzahler was eating with Andy Warhol and handed them a postcard. Warhol bought one. The art world opened.
By twenty-one he was showing in galleries. By twenty-two he was the youngest artist ever invited to Documenta in Kassel. The paintings are dense, layered, furious: text fragments, anatomical drawings, crown symbols, crossed-out words, references to Black history, jazz, boxing, anatomy textbooks, and street signage. They look unplanned but they are not. The crossed-out words are deliberate. He wanted you to read them, then register the erasure.
He and Warhol collaborated on a series of paintings in 1984 and 1985. The relationship was complicated by the art market's tendency to treat Basquiat as Warhol's protege rather than his peer, and by the fact that Warhol, older and more established, got better reviews for the joint work. Basquiat pulled away.
He died of a heroin overdose in 1988, at twenty-seven. His paintings now sell for over 100 million dollars. He would have found that both satisfying and absurd.
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