Keith Haring

By 1982, the year of Keith Haring's seminal solo show at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York, he had firmly established his signature graphic style, which evoked cartoons and borrowed from 1970s graffiti culture. Indeed, the primacy of line in Haring's work became a dominant visual language of the decade. Haring's ability to blur the lines between high art and popular culture, street art and gallery exhibitions, reflected the changing dynamics of the art world during this period.

The present painting executed in sumi ink with dark ink on white paper, represents an inverse of Haring's famed spontaneous white chalk drawings. These earlier works, created on black-papered subway advertisement spaces, had launched his career. The long drips demonstrate the spontaneity and immediacy of the painting—Haring never approached his work with a full understanding of his composition. Instead, he learned to work quickly and automatically—as he would have been accustomed to on his subway works for fear of being caught—and pulled from his personal iconographic library of symbols and motifs. In this piece, Haring's recurring motifs populate the page: a snake, an upside-down heart, and Surrealist distortions of the human form all intertwine in a maze-like wreath around a central winged angel.