HUMLEBÆK.- Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark is showing Headstrong featuring works by the legendary artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. The exhibition presents 49 works on paper and one single painting, Untitled from 1982, a masterpiece that established his fame. All works have one central motif: the head. Headstrong is the first museum exhibition to focus on Basquiat’s depictions of human heads.

Jean-Michel Basquiat burst onto the New York art scene in 1981 with a riot of heads, figures and signs, becoming the first Black American artist to rivet the attention of the art world and the media.

Basquiat was fully aware of his role as an artist at a time when hip-hop was giving the world new rhythms. He emerged out of nowhere in New York’s streets, clubs and art world. His drawings of heads are imprinted with the consciousness of a young Black artist, though they feature no explicit symbols or words pointing in that direction. Basquiat opened the art world to other cultures, voices and identities, and his significance today extends far beyond the world of contemporary art.

The head drawings also offer insight into the pressure Basquiat was under, and the pressure he put on himself. He was just 27 years old when he buckled under the weight of being a pioneer. As the artist Alvaro Barrington points out, Basquiat’s biography can easily be reduced to bullet points. But the wellspring of his success, his artistic talent, defies simplification.

Headstrong centres on works on paper made between 1981 and 1983, Basquiat’s most prolific and experimental period. During those years, the human head was a recurring motif. Revealing a fascination with anatomy, caricature and symbolic abstraction, the heads are a singular and productive contribution to Basqiat’s practice. The exhibition includes one single painting from this period, Untitled from 1982, a masterpiece of the kind that established his fame.

A private body of work

By all indications a more private project, the heads remained unknown during the artist’s lifetime. Unlike Basquiat’s expansive paintings and collages, they reveal an introspective side to his work. The outside world appears to recede. There are none of his trademark symbols, writing or historical references, just a succession of faces caught in the ray of light.

Drawn almost exclusively in oilstick, the heads stand out for their scale, physicality and immediacy. Often, they bear marks indicating that the artist worked on the floor. The fact that Basquiat kept most of these drawings to himself invites reflection on their nature and significance to him. Away from the public eye, they embody a persistent exploration of the head, a process of working through a subject.

Heads, not portraits

Basquiat’s works can be linked to similar heads by modernist pioneers like Picasso and Klee, but they also reveal a fundamental interest in how the human interior is manifested in the exterior, reflecting ancient notions of spirit and flesh. The mouth, ears and eyes are conduits between outer and inner realities.

Themes of X-raying and laying bare are central. These are not traditional portraits but “heads” in a more expansive sense. Potentially representing Basquiat’s own subjectivity, they are snapshots of an artistic consciousness working overtime.

Basquiat – Headstrong extends a series of exhibitions devoted to works on paper. The Louisiana has previously shown works on paper by artists including Philip Guston, David Hockney, Nancy Spero, Vija Celmins, George Condo, Richard Prince and Ed Ruscha.

Curator: Anders Kold.

Catalogue: The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue in English, featuring essays by Hilton Als, George Condo and the exhibition’s curator, Anders Kold. The catalogue also includes texts by Julie Mehretu, Ouattara Watts, Alvaro Barrington and Dana Schutz.

Louisiana Channel has posted the film Drawings Between Life and Death (45:52 min.), featuring five contemporary artists discussing Basquiat from today’s perspective. The artists are Alvaro Barrington, Ouattara Watts, Julie Mehretu, Arthur Jafa and Dana Schutz. The film can be viewed on Louisiana Channel on YouTube here.

For the exhibition, Louisiana Channel has edited five separate videos of the above artists discussing Basquiat and the works in Headstrong.