N ew York, 1981. The city is fraying at the edges, its storefronts dimmed and its rhythms unsettled. Somewhere within it, a 20-year-old Jean-Michel Basquiat is moving between borrowed rooms and park benches, painting not on canvas but on whatever the street offers. A set of discarded window blinds becomes something else entirely—a surface, a signal, a threshold between visibility and obscurity.
Law Offices – Notary Public captures a moment that feels almost impossible to stage: the instant an artist crosses from survival into authorship. Symbols emerge, destabilised and reimagined, hinting at a language that would come to define a generation. What reads at first as raw improvisation reveals itself, slowly, as something sharper—coded, deliberate, and already unmistakably Basquiat.
This statement piece is a highlight of the Art Moderne et Contemporain Evening Auction taking place at Sotheby's Paris on 16 April.
