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There are moments in an artist’s work where repetition becomes revelation. In the exhibition ‘Basquiat - Headstrong’, that moment takes the form of the human head: cartoonish yet anatomical, part skull, part mask, hovering between human and animal. Seen together at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark, these works on paper do not read as studies or sidelines to Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings, but as a sustained and deeply felt inquiry, one that cuts to the core of his practice at the very moment it was coming into being.
The exhibition brings together 50 works, 49 drawings and one painting, made primarily between 1981 and 1983, the years that fundamentally shaped Basquiat as an artist. Crucially, these heads were not shown during his lifetime. Kept back, stored away, they only entered public view in 1990, more than two years after his death. Their delayed emergence lends the exhibition a particular intimacy: these are not works addressed to an audience, but works Basquiat chose to live with.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
As Anders Kold, senior curator and head of acquisitions at Louisiana, puts it, these drawings 'were not made for the market. They were all untitled. And yet he kept making them.' That persistence, obsessive in its focus, lies at the heart of this exhibition. While more than a thousand works on paper were found in Basquiat’s estate, this group stands apart for what it withholds. There are no words, no slogans, no symbols. Absent are the historical references, cultural citations and textual fragments that have come to define Basquiat’s visual language. What remains is the head as subject, motif and container.
The effect is striking. Hung together, the heads confront the viewer with an unsettling range of mental states: skulls and masks, cartoon faces and anatomical cross-sections, eyes that bulge or empty out, mouths clenched into grids of teeth. These are not portraits, nor allegories. They are, as Kold suggests, 'mental heads – containers of emotional archival states'. The head becomes a site where interior and exterior collapse into one another, where psychological pressure is given physical form.
‘He was completely beyond as a draughtsman. His line is comparable to the greatest mark-makers in history’
Anders Kold, senior curator and head of acquisitions at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
That pressure is inseparable from the conditions under which the works were made. Many of the drawings bear the marks of their own production: smudges, fingerprints, even footprints. Basquiat worked on the floor, oilstick pressed hard into paper, moving fast and exerting force. 'You can almost read how they came about,' Kold notes. 'With great speed and physical intensity – and then, suddenly, he would stop. He knew what he was after.'
This physicality resists the long-standing myth of Basquiat as an intuitive or chaotic draughtsman. On the contrary, the drawings reveal a fierce control. The heads are typically centred on the page, the line is confident, economical, assured. For Kold, this is one of the exhibition’s quiet revelations: 'He was completely beyond as a draughtsman. His line is comparable to the greatest mark-makers in history.'
Yet technical mastery is only part of the story. Made at the height of Basquiat’s meteoric rise – when, at just 21 or 22, he had broken through barriers no Black artist of his generation had – these works also register vulnerability. Without overt reference to race, politics or biography, they nonetheless absorb the pressures of visibility, expectation and scrutiny.
'It’s impossible to take his identity as a young Black man out of the equation,' Kold says. 'There’s a sense of asking: how is the world really looking at me?' That question reverberates beyond the drawings themselves. In the exhibition’s final room, a series of filmed conversations brings Basquiat into dialogue with contemporary artists Alvaro Barrington, Arthur Jafa, Julie Mehretu, Dana Schutz and Ouattara Watts. Speaking candidly about their encounters with his work – and, in Watts’ case, with Basquiat himself – they reflect on his continuing relevance, his generosity of influence, and the difficulty of seeing past the mythology that surrounds him.
Their presence grounds ‘Headstrong’ in the present tense in a very specific way. The filmed contributions do not frame Basquiat as a source of influence to be decoded or claimed, but as a figure whose questions remain unresolved. Barrington, Jafa, Mehretu, Schutz and Watts speak less about style than about proximity: about returning to Basquiat as a way of thinking through visibility, abstraction, race and authorship under pressure. By placing these voices in the final room, after the encounter with the drawings, the exhibition resists explanation. Instead, it allows the work to set the terms, and the contemporary responses to register as aftershocks rather than interpretations.
What emerges is a quieter but more durable repositioning of Basquiat. By withholding biography and refusing to monumentalise his celebrity, the exhibition insists on looking at the work as work – made at speed, at scale, and under extraordinary psychological strain. 'Mythology makes him too big,' Kold says. Here, that mythology is neither denied nor indulged; it is simply set aside. What remains is an artist grappling, through the head, with how meaning forms when identity, perception and self-understanding are all unstable. ‘Basquiat – Headstrong’ does not resolve those questions. Instead, it makes clear that they shaped his practice at its point of origin, not as themes he illustrated, but as conditions he worked within, setting the terms through which the rest of his work would unfold.
‘Basquiat – Headstrong’ is at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art until 17 April 2026, louisiana.dk/en
