Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 Untitled piece could potentially sell for a cool $60 million.
According to Sotheby’s, the painting “has been virtually unseen since it last appeared on the market in May 1984.”
Untitled is undoubtedly Basquiat’s most expensive work of all time. Dustheads, his second most expensive piece, sold for a whopping $48.8 million at Christie’s New York back in May 2013.
The fine art auction house said in a statement:
“Untitled is among the most important paintings by the artist still in private hands. The vast canvas marks a critical moment in the artist’s career, executed in the same year that the artist had his seminal first solo exhibitions at Annina Nosei Gallery in New York and Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles. Intricate layers of forcefully applied and impastoed oilstick, acrylic, and spraypaint in a spectrum of electric color coalesce in an intensely worked, rich surface that exemplifies Basquiat’s singular command as a master colorist and draftsman. Exploding in a torrent of irrepressible gestural energy that reflects Basquiat’s early beginnings in graffiti, the painting further inaugurated the beginnings of a new mode of figurative painting that took hold of the New York art world in downtown Manhattan in the early 1980s.”
Take a look at Untitled above, which will join works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Gerhard Richter in the upcoming auction.