The Field Next To The Other Road - Jean-Michel Basquiat - Abstract Expressionist Painting

Jean-Michel Basquiat December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was an American artist who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement. The Field Next to the Other Road was executed in 1981, an important year in Basquiat's career, in which he made the transition from a street artist to an established gallery artist in New York's downtown art scene. Basquiat was invited to Modena, Italy by art dealer Emilio Mazzoli after he saw his work at New York's MoMA PS1 in February 1981. In Modena, Basquiat commenced a series of paintings for his first solo exhibition at Galleria d'Arte Emilio Mazzoli in May 1981. Among the paintings created was The Field Next to the Other Road, a depiction of skeletal man walking a cow.

Jean-Michel Basquiat emerged from the "Punk" scene in New York as a gritty, street-smart graffiti artist who successfully crossed over from his "downtown" origins to the international art gallery circuit. In a few fast-paced years, Basquiat swiftly rose to become one of the most celebrated, and possibly most commercially exploited American "naif" painters of the widely celebrated Neo-Expressionism art movement.   Basquiat's work is one of the few examples of how an early 1980s American Punk, or graffiti-based and counter-cultural practice could become a fully recognized, critically embraced and popularly celebrated artistic phenomenon, indeed not unlike the rise of American Hip Hop during the same era.