The Keith Haring Show

Major exhibition catalogue which brings together 200 works – sculptures, paintings and works on paper – that document the short but intense career of one of the most celebrated artists of the late 20th century.

Art icon of the 1980s, Keith Haring first gained attention in the late 1970s for his drawings in the New York City subways.
Over the next decade his subway graffiti, murals, sculptures and paintings gained worldwide recognition. Haring’s meteoritic artistic career spanned from 1980 to 1990, and in this brief period his boundless energy led him to produce an enormous quantity of legendary works.
Here Haring’s work is re-examined from the perspective of his relations not just with Pop Art and the Neo-Pop movement, but also with Flemish painting and the historic avant-garde movements, reflecting the evolution of his creative poetics and the legacy he left.
The volume presents an exhaustive picture of the complexity of Haring’s work, emphasizing its relevance to the present day but also placing the accent on the complicated relations between his art and the iconographies and themes of Western art and of African, Asiatic and South American tribal cultures.
The book features an extensive range of photographs that document the context in which his art was inspired and developed as well as, among other works, Haring’s famous subway drawings, the primitive and Cubist masks, the great terracotta vases, the totemic sculptures, the metal statues of his little men in primary colours and the plaster statues of Michelangelo’s David and Madame Pompadour.

In addition to essays by the editors, the volume includes texts by Arturo Schwartz, Jeffrey Deitch, David Galloway, Peter Halley, Antonello Negri, Fernanda Pivano, Tony Shafrazi, Kim Hastreiter, Julia Gruen and Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, as well as a series of previously unpublished interviews by John Gruen with Keith Haring himself and with his friends, including Yoko Ono, William Burroughs, Leo Castelli, Henry Geldzhaler, Timothy Leary, Roy Lichtenstein, Brooke Shields and Madonna.