Headstrong – Basquiat on Paper at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Humlebæk, Denmark
04 February 2026
From 30 January to 17 May 2026, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presents ‘Basquiat –– Headstrong’, the first institutional exhibition to focus exclusively on Jean-Michel Basquiat’s persistent and radical engagement with the human head. Bringing together 45 works on paper produced between 1981 and 1983, the exhibition offers a tightly focused yet expansive view of a motif that sits at the core of Basquiat’s visual language.
The early 1980s marked one of the most intense and experimental periods of Basquiat’s career. During these years, the head emerged as a site of constant reinvention—at once anatomical, symbolic and psychological. Skulls, faces, and mask-like visages appear fractured, crowned, hollowed out or aggressively marked, oscillating between caricature and abstraction. These images suggest an ongoing negotiation between exterior appearance and interior life, between what is exposed and what remains inaccessible. Rather than fixed identities, the heads form a shifting gallery of personae, charged with emotion, tension and vulnerability.
Works on paper played a central role in Basquiat’s practice, and ‘Headstrong’ foregrounds their physical immediacy. Executed almost exclusively in oil stick, the drawings are notable for their scale, density and raw material presence. Many bear traces of having been made on the floor, reinforcing their bodily, almost performative nature. Unlike much of Basquiat’s better-known paintings, these works are largely devoid of textual fragments and explicit references to contemporary social life. This absence sharpens their ambiguity: if they are neither preparatory studies nor conventional portraits, what function did they serve?
The exhibition proposes that these works constitute a private and experimental laboratory within Basquiat’s practice. Although deeply connected to his broader investigations of power, race and representation, they operate at a different register—less declarative, more introspective. At a moment when Black artists had limited institutional visibility, these heads can be read as sites of resistance as much as reflection, asserting presence while refusing legibility.
