In Italian Tray by Jean-Michel Basquiat

This Artware exclusive pairs Jean-Michel Basquiat's iconic  In Italian (1983) with a beautifully hand-crafted lacquered tray. This square tray is great all over the house - on your coffee table, in the bathroom, for serving cocktails, or catching mail - and comes in an elegant custom box for easy gifting.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (American, 1960 - 1988) rose to prominence in the 1980s with his neo-expressionist paintings but his oeuvre really began with the street art he made in New York City’s Lower East Side in the mid-1970s.  There he developed his improvisational style that appropriates symbols and references from a wide range of sources including music, religion, and history combined with cultural and political commentary to explore the meaning of being African American in contemporary society. His iconic In Italian includes many of these word and symbols - like “crown of thorns,” “corpus,” and images of human anatomy - which point to some of these central themes concerning the individual, religion and mortality.