Keith Haring

KEITH HARING (Pennsylvania, 1958- New York, 1990).
"Subway Drawing" 1980.
Chalk on black paper.
Provenance: - Chandler Wade collection - Great Britain collection - Koller Auctions, Zurich, Switzerland.
Measurements: 105 x 70 cm; 113 x 79 cm (frame).

Keith Haring grouped under the epigraph "Subway Drawings" a huge number of spontaneous drawings that he made while traveling in the New York subway in the early eighties. The artist was fascinated by street art, then on the rise thanks to Basquiat, but he was not so much interested in leaving his mark on the cars as in capturing the colorful atmosphere of those moments of transit on sheets of paper. He began drawing this series on his way from home to work. He was inspired by the advertising posters hanging in every subway station. The result was almost abstract silhouettes. He opted for the white stroke of chalk on black paper as if it were a blackboard on which you can make and remake the figures over and over again. Black for him evoked those interstices where the walls run out of posters and, while waiting for a new poster, a black panel is put up. What interested Haring most, as he proclaimed on numerous occasions, was to confront the diverse reactions that people on the street (the same people who travel by subway) had to these abstract drawings, influenced both by oriental calligraphy and by the schematic signs of urban signage: "the great diversity of people who live and work in New York has always been an essential motivation for my attraction to this city," he writes.

Keith Haring was an American artist whose pop art and graffiti grew out of New York City's street culture in the 1980s. Haring's work grew in popularity thanks to his spontaneous drawings on the New York City subway in chalk on black and white advertising space backgrounds. After achieving public recognition, he created large-scale works as murals.His later work often addressed political and social issues, especially homosexuality and AIDS, through his own iconography. Today Haring's work is divided between major private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Bass Museum in Miami; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Ludwig Museum in Cologne; and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He also created a wide variety of public works, including the infirmary at Children's Village in Dobbs Ferry, New Yorkand the second-floor men's room at Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in Manhattan, which was later transformed into an office and is known as the Keith Haring Room. In January 2019, an exhibition called "Keith Haring New York" opened at New York Law School in the main building of its Tribeca campus.