Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn in 1960. Although Basquiat first made his mark as a graffiti artist, he is now known as a staple of 1980's neo-expressionist art.
Basquiat, who had a major drug problem, had an obsession with the morbid. He has taken a simple idea, a simple object, and uses particularly vivid colors to convey his own ideas about human thought and human appearance. Basquiat shows the roughness and violence of the human face. It is not clear what state this face is in; there are classic elements of the skull, but basquiat inserts flesh colors where usually only bone and would exist. The top of the skull is filled in with black to suggest corruption, and maybe confusion. What is usually a simple recognizable image is now, in Basquiats depiction, morose and dark.
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