Keith Haring - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Monday, June 28, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Galleria Ala Salvatore, Milan

  • Catalogue Essay

    Master draughtsman Keith Haring's singular, signature style has always been lauded for its simplicity and movement. To Haring, drawings were never studies for works in other mediums but autonomous creations. With its bold graphic quality, complex composition and glorious colour scheme, the painting presented here carries all hallmarks of Haring's rich body of work which was executed in the short time span before his untimely death in 1990.
    "The drawings I do have very little to do with classical, post-Renaissance drawings where you try to imitate life or make it appear to be life-like. My drawings don't try to imitate life, they try to create life, try to invent life. That's a much more so-called primitive idea, which is the reason that my drawings look like they could be Aztec or Egyptian or Aboriginal or all these other things, and why they have so much in common with them. It has the same attitude towards drawing: inventing images. You're sort of depicting life, but you're not trying to make it life-like. I don't use colours to try to look life-like, and I don't use lines to try to look life-like. It's also much more Pop, I guess, after growing up in a really carbon- and comic- dominated period. And, also, growing up with Pop art."(Keith Haring, from interview with C. Flyman, 26 September 1980,  in G. Celant, Keith Haring, Munich 1992, p. 116)

  • Artist Biography

    Keith Haring

    American • 1958 - 1990

    Haring's art and life typified youthful exuberance and fearlessness. While seemingly playful and transparent, Haring dealt with weighty subjects such as death, sex and war, enabling subtle and multiple interpretations. 

    Throughout his tragically brief career, Haring refined a visual language of symbols, which he called icons, the origins of which began with his trademark linear style scrawled in white chalk on the black unused advertising spaces in subway stations. Haring developed and disseminated these icons far and wide, in his vibrant and dynamic style, from public murals and paintings to t-shirts and Swatch watches. His art bridged high and low, erasing the distinctions between rarefied art, political activism and popular culture. 

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36

Untitled

1984
Acrylic and sumi ink on card.
70 x 100 cm (27 1/2 x 39 1/2 in).
This work is registered with the Keith Haring Foundation and is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.  

Estimate
£150,000 - 200,000 

Sold for £157,250

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

29 June 2010
London