KEITH HARING | UNTITLED

Private Collection, New York

Private Collection, Suffern (acquired from the above circa 1995-2000)

“When you're drawing, it's completely separate because drawing is making a mark and cutting into space and just finding something that didn't exist before. It's pure creation in its simplest form..." 

- Keith Haring

Despite his tragically short life, curtailed at the tender age of thirty-one, Haring nonetheless enjoyed an intensely prolific and illustrious career, rising to prominence in the early 1980s with his graffiti subway drawings, before spiralling meteorically into an art world sensation. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1958, Haring moved to New York City in 1978, where he became submerged in the thriving underground art and music scene. Alongside his contemporaries such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf, Haring sought to imbue his works with the spirit of the times, drawing from the exploding downtown New York counterculture of rap, hip-hop, street dance, and graffiti art. Studying on a scholarship at the School of Visual Arts, he developed a distinctive iconography of signs, symbols and ciphers. These motifs began to populate his artworks, defying traditional limitations as they spilled over from his canvases and works on paper onto found wooden boards, the walls of the streets, and the subway. Delineated in bold, black, cartoonish lines, Haring envisaged a universal language of direct and simplified form and popping primary colours: “A more holistic and basic idea of wanting to incorporate [art] into every part of life,” he explained, “less as an egotistical exercise and more natural somehow. I don’t know how to exactly explain it. Taking it off the pedestal. I’m giving it back to the people, I guess” (Keith Haring cited in: Daniel Drenger, ‘Art and Life: An Interview with Keith Haring,’ Columbia Art Review, Spring 1988, p. 53).