Basquiat’s Saturday Night at Christie’s Hong Kong

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Christie’s is honoured to present Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Sabado por la Noche (Saturday Night) (estimate: HK$95,000,000 – 125,000,000 / US$13,000,000 – 16,000,000) as the leading highlight of the 20^th/21^st Century Evening Sale in Hong Kong on 28 March, coinciding with Art Basel for the very first time.

This immersive masterpiece sits amongst the most iconic in Basquiat’s oeuvre, capturing his signature style of masterfully interweaving text, iconography, and human figures. The work marks a defining moment in Basquiat’s career, executed in 1984, the same year as his first solo museum show which travelled to the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam after its debut at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery, affirming his ascent to global fame. Its multi-layered composition, comprising at once material richness and thematic complexity, epitomises the unique creative vocabulary that marked Basquiat as one of the most important artists of the last century.

In Sabado por la Noche (Saturday Night), Basquiat fuses a bounty of cultural sources and ideas, including two ‘Griot’ figures – a key motif for the artist, inspired by West African storytellers or poets – alongside street art, and human anatomy. Interwoven throughout the nuanced composition are traces of the artist’s intellectual lexicon: embedded sheets of paper are scrawled with symbols relating to the solar system, Fibonacci’s golden ratio, ‘knowledge’, ‘truth’, and ‘birth’, and doubled gyres and spirals.