Keith Haring

U.S. painter and draftsman. Haring studied at New York City’s School of Visual Arts and developed a unique style inspired by graffiti, cartoons, and comic strips, which he displayed in works drawn clandestinely at night on subway station walls around the city. He also created paintings, drawings, and prints in a graffiti style, filling the works from edge to edge using signs, abstract symbols, and human and animal figures writhing in a spaceless, airless design. In the 1980s he executed murals in New York and exhibited internationally, achieving great commercial success.

Keith Haring: Labyrinths of Life and Death

By Germano Celant (Archive.com)

For Keith Haring, painting was a crucible – a site of transformation, of birth and death, a place where objects, lines, colors, and forms went through a creative catharsis and were then transmuted in order to experience a tempest of personal and social, erotic and mystical impulses. This alchemy produced labyrinthal images filled with dreamlike flashes that absorbed the flow of figures and representations – some of them cruel and tragic, some of them playful and happy. Haring’s physicalized language and his environmental and material poetry brought forth a network of interweaving signs that could act on the nervous system of a city such as New York, profoundly challenging the encoded and elitist system of art.

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