Keith Haring’s unique visual language and symbolic sensibility unfurl across the surface of Untitled, 1983. His totemic central figure—nearly the full height of the ten-foot square tarp—crouches in a dynamic squat that bristles with energy, like a freeze-frame of a dancer, with the gravitas and timelessness of prehistoric sculpture. A monumental example of Haring’s witty style, Untitled synthesizes the artist’s enduring ability to imbue his 1980s downtown New York social milieu with an archetypical simplicity of form, in a universal language of freedom of expression.
 

Coming out of the downtown New York scene, Haring’s visual work takes on the vibrancy of the music and dance cultures that surrounded him. The rhythmic pose of the figure in Untitled recalls the boisterous physical movements of both break-dancing and voguing, in a dual reference to the underground hip-hop and queer communities that Haring circled within. Both dance styles are explosive, and take pleasure in physical distortion and the angles of the human body, and Haring captures this energy in the central figure of Untitled. “1982 to 1984 was the peak of rap music and breakdancing,” Haring explained, and “graffiti was the visual tie-in” to this style of dance. “A lot of my inspiration was coming out of watching break-dancers, so my drawings started spinning on their heads and twisting and turning all around.”ⁱ

 

After signing with dealer Tony Shafrazi in 1982, Haring sought a new format for his large-scale paintings, that registered the gravitas of gallery representation without sacrificing the grit and edge of his street art origins. While walking the streets of New York, he noticed a Con Edison construction crew who covered their equipment with a large sheet of industrial tarpaulin. The large-scale and machine-made quality of the tarp appealed to Haring, who sought out a tarp manufacturer in Brooklyn and purchased a selection of “canvases” for his inaugural solo show with Tony Shafrazi Gallery later that year. Untitled represented this seminal body of work early the following calendar year, in the group exhibition at Tony Shafrazi, Champions, January 15 – February 19, 1983.

“I am intrigued with the shapes people choose as their symbols to create a language.” 
—Keith HaringUntitled is an aggrandizement of Haring’s astute linear sensibilities, as perfected in his practice of graffiti. Through street art, Haring honed an economy of line and energetic expression, which give work like Untitled its striking visual quality. Haring‘s unique ability to create work that popped off city walls is translated into the bright color palette and dynamism of Untitled. The central figure is composed of arching sky-blue lines, confidently brushed against the black vinyl tarp, and filled in with a matrix of scarlet red gridded with rectangular black dots. In purposefully limiting his palette to blue, red, and black, Haring allows the cleverness of his composition to shine through. 

 

Untitled is not just one figure, but multiple images in one. Haring codes a smiley face into the dancer’s pose: their hands form the eyes, and the blue line of their legs turns into a smile. The negative space of Untitled holds symbolic value as well, most obviously in the feminine symbol, keyholded into the center of the figure. Further, the space under the arms of the figure cleaves into two halves of a broken heart locket, which wait to be reconnected by the feminine symbol “key.” 

 

 

The feminine symbol at the center of the work confirms a connection between the squatting pose of the figure and the forms of historic fertility and mother goddess sculptures, such as the Indian fertility goddess Lajja Gauri; the zig-zagged sides of the figure, too, recall the stylized body of the Ancient Roman she-wolf. These multivalent readings of Untitled, steeped in human history and Haring’s contemporary moment, speak to the universality of his visual idiom.

 

 

ⁱ  Keith Haring, quoted in John Gruen, et al., Keith Haring, New York, 2008, p. 236.