The 1980s was a time filled meteoric personalities and creative movements — from music to fashion to art. When it comes to the latter industry, it's hard to find a collaboration that still carries the cultural weight as the link up between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. From 1983 to 1985, the two created 160 works that recently was the subject of a monumental exhibition last year at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in the outskirts of Paris, followed by an exhibition at the Brant Foundation in New York.
Sotheby's is set to auction a major work from those two shows, Untitled (1984), hailed as one of the most prolific pieces the two created together during that time. The large-scale painting was devised under the Surrealist technique of “exquisite corpse,” a collaborative drawing approach which saw both artists take turns adding layers to an artwork, with Warhol first laying down baseball mitts, tennis rackets and various corporate logos, alongside Basquait's totemic figures and scribbly color fields.
Courtesy of Sotheby's
“Of all the Warhol-Basquiat works from this brief and fertile moment, Untitled stands out as one of the supreme examples, fully showcasing the range of their artistic powers," said Lucius Elliott, Sotheby's Head of Contemporary Marquee Auctions in a statement. "The painting is a masterpiece of juxtaposition and contradiction: the cool, mechanical restraint of Warhol’s imagery, overlaid with Basquiat’s anarchic energy and freewheeling technique. Warhol and Basquiat perform a call and response throughout the painting, riffing and improvising off one another’s work to create a radical, harmonious symphony of color, imagery and form.”
Untitled is hitting auction for the first time in 15 years as part of Sotheby's Contemporary Evening Sale and is estimated to fetch around $18m USD — which would shatter previous sums for the Warhol-Basquiat series. The artwork will go on view in Hong Kong (April 2-6), London (April 11-12), Los Angeles (April 17-19) and finally New York for the exhibition in early May.
