The first exhibition devoted exclusively to the drawings of the human head by the legendary US artist Jean-Michel Basquiat has opened at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.
Basquiat’s fascination with the human body began when his mother gave him an anatomy book after he was seriously injured in a car accident at the age of seven. This obsession, pursued with a “bulimic” appetite, is evident throughout his entire body of work. When asked at the age of 22 how he usually began a piece of work, Basquiat answered simply, “I suppose I would start with a head.”
Basquiat: Headstrong focuses on the artist’s drawings, centred uniquely on this motif. Featuring work produced between 1981 and 1983, the exhibition showcases pieces created using dense, richly pigmented oil sticks. These depict heads, skulls, quasi-anatomical faces, or even helmets, with eyes and mouths appearing with raw intensity as gateways to inner emotions and psychological worlds.
While many of the heads face the viewer directly, subtle shifts in angle distort their internal structure, creating the impression that the faces are splitting, rotating, or collapsing under emotional pressure. Lines loop and spiral to form dense networks that evoke mental agitation and physical tension. Many sheets bear dust, footprints, and stains, physical evidence that Basquiat often worked on the floor of his studio.
Contemporary artist Dana Schutz noted that she was struck by the energy emanating from the drawings, which she attributes to “mental thoughts, heat, pain, or smells.” Fellow artist Alvaro Barrington adds that while some heads are formal experiments, others serve as “biological, biographical, geological or cultural explorations.” Similarly, Julie Mehretu describes how Basquiat captured the brain as a “psycho-computer” long before the digital era.
Basquiat’s touch is as immediate and powerful in these drawings as in his paintings. The colours appear even more vivid, perhaps because there is nothing to distract from the heads placed squarely on the page. These drawings are strikingly devoid of the symbols and textual fragments often found in his larger works, with one notable exception: the artist’s signature crown.
Often seen hovering above black male figures, such as athletes, musicians, and writers, the crown – which can resemble a saint’s aureole – allowed Basquiat to elevate historically marginalised subjects to a royal, even saintly, status.
While one might wonder whether these drawings served as studies for later canvases, they stand as finished works in their own right rather than preparatory sketches, though the mystery remains as to why the artist chose not to show them during his lifetime.
The only painting included in the exhibition is Untitled (1982), which features a large skull-like head surrounded by graffiti-style markings against a soft blue background. Often referred to as the artist’s iconic skull painting, it sold at Sotheby’s New York in 2017 for $110.5 million to Japanese collector Yusaku Maezawa.
Louisiana curator Anders Kold writes that the heads are “characterised by shuddering dissonances between their anatomical parts,” ranging “from something close to the fullness of living flesh to the appearance of skulls, masks or mechanical, automaton-like figures.”
Some of these works were first introduced to the public in 1990, two years after Basquiat’s death, at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York, but the Louisiana exhibition offers a more concentrated psychological study, inviting viewers to see the artist as a human presence among others rather than a myth, while also opening up the opportunity to reconsider questions of power, race and representation that remain central today.
Early reactions have been enthusiastic. On Instagram, fashion historian Laird Borrelli-Persson described Basquiat as “the man of the moment – again – always,” while fellow artists emphasise the deep connection between Basquiat’s work and hip-hop culture, arguing that he remains more relevant today than almost any other late twentieth-century artist.
