Outside the Box
- Catalog
- OW-018
- Year
- 2026
- Medium
- Acrylic and oil stick on canvas
- Size
- 24 x 32 in / 61 x 81 cm
- Availability
- Original sold -- prints available
Two big spiral eyes and a mouth full of stripes. The words are scattered around the edges -- BOX, THE, SIDE, OUT -- and there's a tic-tac-toe grid up in the corner.
Catalogue note
A face reduced to three marks -- two concentric spirals and a barred mouth -- scaled until it fills the canvas edge to edge, painted in a full-spectrum scribble that never settles into local colour. The title has to be assembled by the viewer: BOX sits in one corner beside a filled-in noughts-and-crosses grid, THE runs across the top in chrome yellow, SIDE and OUT stack at the right, and the phrase only resolves once you stop reading left to right. Text as scattered instruction rather than caption is the Basquiat inheritance he names himself; making the viewer do the assembly is his own move.