Spain belongs to a group of works in which Basquiat used his oilstick and graphite windmill drawing — part engineer's blueprint, part whimsical diagram, annotated with wind arrows, a tilted ladder, and the inscription "WIND WATER ELECTRICITY" — as a repeating foundation. Where the related QUIJ (1985) surrounds the windmill with a dense archive of anatomical details, construction drawings, corporate logos, and portraiture, Spain assembles a markedly different world around it.

Against a muted yellow ground, a silkscreen version of the windmill drawing is framed by an increased density of black and white Xerox collage. The surrounding imagery trades QUIJ's encyclopedic range for something more mythological: cartoon-like representations of fantastical creatures and human figures populate the margins, including a reference to Titian — one of the defining painters of the European Renaissance — alongside a notation in the lower right corner identifying the "FIRST DRAWING OF MOON — GALILEO." The pairing is characteristic of the way Basquiat moved between registers of knowledge and authority: a sixteenth-century painter and the astronomer who first mapped the lunar surface appear here as equal entries in a private cosmology, measured against the mechanical logic of the windmill at the center.

The work sits within the most productive stretch of Basquiat's career. By 1985 he had shown at documenta 7 in Kassel, begun his collaboration with Andy Warhol, and established the Xerox collage method as a vehicle for the kind of dense, layered thinking that resisted resolution into a single reading. Spain offers one of its most elegantly compressed examples: a drawing that generates worlds each time it is revisited.