Fluorescent colors and thick, black lines shaped into silhouettes dominate these works.
#Keith haring retrospect free
Some of the works that best exemplify the style and themes of Haring’s production are Free South Africa (1985) and Crack is Wack (1986). Many of Haring’s human subjects can in fact be seen performing specific hip-hop and break-dance moves, such as head spins, the so-called “electric boogies”, which entailed dancers standing up and moving their hands and bodies in a robot-like manner, and other moves performed closer to the floor, involving thrusting bodies balancing on one hand. The element of improvisation, the pulsating rhythm and moves of hip-hop particularly attracted Haring, who transcribed these elements directly into his compositions and figures. Haring was an active participant in New York’s counterculture and completely immersed himself in the music and dance scene of DJs, hip-hop, and break dance. These ideas are also evident in Haring’s lifelong commitment to the creation of a truly public art that was a direct and unmediated expression of his own feelings, easily understood by the audience. Haring’s artistic vision was also influenced by Jean Dubuffet’s art theory and Robert Henri’s manifesto The Art Spirit (1923), which advocated creative freedom and the right to self-expression as the main driving forces in an artist’s work. His cut-ups from 1980, collages of fake newspaper headlines, as well as his Subway Drawings (1982) commented on and blatantly attacked Ronald Reagan’s policies and the Catholic Church. He also actively engaged with the political scenario of his time. His Street art works, which he began to make in 1982, include white-chalk drawings on sheets of black paper used to cover old advertisements and other surfaces in New York’s subway stations.
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The artistic tendencies of New York in 1980s provided Haring with a vibrant framework for the elaboration of his own artistic practice. His most recurring subjects include dancing human figures, crawling babies, barking dogs, flying saucers, pyramids, heart motifs, and other familiar elements. In 1980, he also moved towards figuration. These first experiments will lead to the creation of a distinctive style dominated by linearity, patterns, easily legible subject matters, a bright palette, and absolute freedom of expression.
#Keith haring retrospect series
A series of drawings from 1978-1979, like Untitled (1978) and Untitled (1979) exemplifies Haring’s early interest in the exploration of abstract shapes interacting with vigorous, gestural markings within a carefully bordered space. He first experimented with a variety of media, producing performance pieces and painted environments in the technique of action painting. In New York, he attended the School of Visual Arts, where he was exposed to the avant-garde propositions of the city’s vibrant artistic scene. He took up painting and drawing at an early age and moved to New York in 1978 in search for artistic inspiration, after dropping out of a commercial art school. Haring was born in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1958. Haring, indeed, sought inspiration for his artistic practice in the popular culture that surrounded him, from New York’s hip-hop scene to Disney's cartoons, and also engaged with the main social and political issues of his time, such as the AIDS epidemic, South African apartheid, and the American conservative politics of the 1890s. He gave his works a distinctively graphic, cartoonish quality and relied on repetitive motifs in creating a visual commentary of both his private experiences and the larger culture of his time. He used few basic colors in hyper-saturated hues, applied as flat areas of paint and shaped into thick silhouettes.
Haring’s signature style is based on abstract, stylized forms worked into interlocking human figures and tightly arranged patterns. Haring produced monumental public works that contributed to bringing recognition to Street art and to its entrance into museums. His work run parallel to that of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf, and other 1980s artists and engages with a variety of media and techniques, such as drawing, painting, body art, graffiti. Keith Haring is one of the key members of a group of avant-garde New York-based artists who helped to redefine the boundaries of Modern art in the 1980s.
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