KunstenaarAmericangeb.1958–ov.1990
Keith Haring
3 actieve items
Keith Allen Haring was born on May 4, 1958, in Reading, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Kutztown, where his father drew cartoons at home - an early influence on a visual sensibility built around line, movement, and immediacy. He moved to New York City in 1978 to study at the School of Visual Arts and, within two years, had found his real studio: the New York City subway system.
From 1980 to 1985, Haring produced thousands of chalk drawings on the black paper used to cover expired advertisement panels throughout the subway network. He treated these blank rectangles as an open invitation - drawing crawling babies emitting rays of light, barking dogs, human figures locked in chains, and dancing bodies that seemed charged with electrical current. The drawings appeared and disappeared with the city's daily rhythms, and they built him an audience far outside any gallery. He called the subway his laboratory.
His first solo gallery show, at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York in 1982, moved that vocabulary into the art world, and recognition followed quickly. He painted murals on buildings across New York, contributed work to public spaces in cities including Chicago, Paris, and Amsterdam, and in 1986 opened the Pop Shop in SoHo - a retail store selling T-shirts, posters, and other objects at prices ordinary people could afford. The Pop Shop drew criticism from some quarters for blurring commercial and fine art lines; Haring saw it as a logical extension of the subway's democratic premise.
His artistic output was inseparable from political commitment. He created the "Crack is Whack" mural in Harlem in 1986, painted "Ignorance = Fear / Silence = Death" in 1989 in direct dialogue with ACT UP's visual campaigns, and used his profile to raise funds for AIDS awareness during the epidemic's most devastating years. Diagnosed with AIDS himself in 1988, he established the Keith Haring Foundation in 1989 with a mandate to fund AIDS organizations and children's programs, a mission the Foundation continues today.
Haring died on February 16, 1990, at the age of 31. His work entered the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among many others. The Nakamura Keith Haring Collection in Japan, dedicated solely to his work, opened in 1994.
On the auction market, Keith Haring's prints dominate, accounting for 43 of his 52 indexed lots on Auctionist. Sales have appeared primarily through Fineart, Phillips, and Pandolfini Casa d'Aste. The highest recorded sale in the Auctionist database reached 41,280 GBP for "Untitled" (L. p. 50), with "The Blueprint Drawings: print 3" achieving 24,510 GBP. His print market has grown consistently, with the average selling price for prints reaching record highs in recent years as collector demand for his 1980s editions remains steady.