“I was a really lousy artist as a kid. . . . I’d never win painting contests. I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect Spiderman.” So Jean-Michel Basquiat confessed in Andy Warhol’s "Interview" magazine in 1983. Born in New York in 1960—a city then at the beating heart of the international artistic scene—Basquiat quickly found his stage. His mother took him to museums and introduced him to art history, and by the age of seventeen he was already covering city walls with provocative graffiti denouncing the pervasive racism in American society—an uncompromising position he maintained throughout his practice, in both graffiti and painting. In this 1986 Self-Portrait, his African American heritage remains central, here conveyed through an oversized head that recalls childhood drawings. The overlapping layers of paint, the drips, the bold strokes and the multidirectional brushwork combine to create the effect of electrified hair. The teeth are bared, the arms outstretched in the form of a cross. The canvas is traversed by dualities: black and white, light and dark, tension and balance. Positioned between two conflicting worlds, the artist challenges all conventions of good and evil.