Keith Haring

Deitch Projects, New York

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is brighter in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals a few small lumps in the paint surface towards the right foot of the red figure and one towards the right foot of the blue figure.
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Rendered in vivid primaries, the interlocking and body popping dancing figures of Untitled embody the absolute quintessence of Keith Haring's extraordinary and truly iconic artistic production. Anointed "the Degas of the B-boys" by Richard Farris Thompson, Haring became iconographer of electric-boogie, break-dance, and the nascent hip-hop scene to emerge from New York's Lower East Side during the early 1980s (Richard Farris Thompson, "Requiem for the Degas of the B-boys", Artforum, May 1990, n.p.). As outlined by Farris: "Haring poetically translated electric boogie and the break dance into his special idiom. Experimenting with these African-American choreographies of the '80s, he established a down-to-earth humanism, idealizing human beings in the richness of their moves and affirmations" (Ibid.).

Acutely aware of the semiotic relationship between image and gesture, Haring forged a graphic dialect of unfaltering line and succinct intensity to transpose the explosive and surging corporeal electricity of a new and powerful sub-culture. For Haring, the dynamic vitality gleaned from the dance floors of the famous all-black disco Paradise Garage in SoHo, embodied a symbolic manifestation of life and continuity itself. Articulated with calligraphic sculptural flourish in the present work, the Capoiera infused ring of physical interconnection charged with the robotically fuelled paroxysm of electric-boogie unfolds a corporal cubism and self-propelling loop of visual syncopation and percussive rhythmical movement. Belonging to the corpus of sculpture created during the artist's last years, with these works Haring sought to capture the social truth and spiritual transcendence inherent to the African-American and Latino dance culture as a means to activate and infiltrate the idiom of New York gallery art. Famous for contesting the binary division of high/low culture, Haring's practice masterfully traversed graffiti and street art; the commerce of his legendary Pop Shop; and challenged the precepts of the art establishment. Imbued with the life and energy of Henri Matisse's paradigmatic Dance (1910), this iconic work is testament to Haring's remarkable artistic invention: Untitled exudes the vibrant cadence and electrifying pictorial language that engendered some of the most emblematic images of the late 20^th Century.