Why Basquiat kept painting skulls. Not memento mori. Not shock value. The head was where everything he was thinking about collided — anatomy, ancestry, race, canonisation, death. He pulled from Gray's Anatomy, the book his mother gave him after a childhood car accident. He pulled from African mask traditions and the skull imagery of Haitian Vodou, a nod to his own heritage. He boxed his figures into grids and labelled them like specimens, then crowned them. That's the whole tension in one image: a body catalogued by others, and a figure insisting on its own greatness anyway. Swipe through → Available works and market advisory — link in bio. ⁠— #Basquiat #JeanMichelBasquiat #GuyHepner #ContemporaryArt #ArtMarket