The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat released Odours Of Punt this past May 2024 in New York City. Published by Flatiron Editions, the posthumous release is signed and stamped by Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, the artist’s sisters and administrators of the Estate.
Odours Of Punt is based on an original artwork created by Basquiat in 1983. It is an outstanding painterly example of the artist’s work incorporating his signature Xerox collage technique with paint and oil stick layering and over painting. Released as a screen print in a very limited edition of 60, Odours Of Punt captures the artist’s signature graffiti style that elevated him to fame during the 1980s in New York City. The gestural marks and expressive nature of the large color fields are pierced like icebergs with text and cave-like markings. Juxtapositions of color, semi-discernible forms and text showcase Basquiat’s boundless creative expression.
Drawing on his Caribbean heritage - a convergence of African American, African and Aztec cultural histories - we can see Basquiat references myrrh and the bird of god. In Aztec mythology, the hummingbird was the main symbol of their principal god Huitzilopochtli who guided the Aztecs on their journey to the promised land.
More mainstream classical themes abound as well. Basquiat references an actual size Venus in what is most likely a reference to the Venus de Milo, a Greek marble sculpture believed to depict Aphrodite the goddess of love whose Roman counterpart was Venus, currently in the Louvre Museum in Paris. Also referenced is Tiberius who succeeded his father Augustus (the first Roman emperor) and was responsible for expanding the borders of the empire along the Danube River into modern day Germany from AD 14-37. A scholar of anatomy, Basquiat constantly refers to various interior cranial facial bone structures in Odours Of Punt.
Odours Of Punt is yet another testament to the immediacy and intellectual depth of Basquiat’s works that won him such widespread acclaim both before and after his untimely death at the age of 27.
