“A painting, to a certain extent, is still the illusion of a material. But once you cut that out of the steel and stand it up, it's a real thing, (...) It has this sense of permanence, of reality, that it will exist much longer than I ever will, so it's a kind of immortality.”
—Keith Haring
Manifesting form, rhythm and unrestrained movement, Keith Haring’s iconographic compositions generate their own mode of visual choreography, their repeating motifs and pronounced internal patterns closely aligned to movement and the embodied power of music and performance. Acrobats was executed in 1986, at a key moment in the artist’s career as he rapidly became one of the most celebrated figures within the New York art world. Offering up a dynamic and energetic display of the iconic forms that propelled the artist to worldwide fame, the present work brings the joyful, colourful movement of his graffitied figures into three dimensions. Haring first began to produce works in aluminium in the mid-1980s at the suggestion of his gallerist Tony Shafrazi: “Put your alphabet in the landscape, in the real world”i. He would debut these sculptures at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1985, continuing from that point to refine and enhance his sculptural practice. The present work is an elegant example of Haring’s multifaceted, ever-evolving oeuvre, and functions as a marker of his broader cultural and aesthetic sensitivity.
Acrobats consists of two enamel-coated aluminium figures, one blue and one orange, attached to a single base. Stacked head-on-head, their poses appear to mirror each other yet, upon closer inspection, actually differ in subtle ways. The sculpture revolves around the sense of suspense and balance, employing bold, complimentary colours and two interlocking vertical and perpendicular planes to create a driving internal dynamism. Typical of Haring’s sculpture, the transformation of flat forms into three-dimensional structures reveals an altered set of priorities and principles at play. In particular, the influence of Matisse is clear in Acrobats, with a clear-sighted interrelation of form and colour that is conceptually, and spatially, perhaps more complex than in Haring’s paintings and drawings. The clean-cut edges and use of enamelled metal in turn create a machine aesthetic reminiscent of Léger or even the Minimalist sculpture of Donald Judd.
“The originality was obvious, and the vocabulary was almost like a dictionary of images. There was no reference to any form of decoration—it wasn’t art that was going to sit on the wall, it was art in movement. What was really important to me—and what I couldn’t put into words at the time—was that there was a really conceptual base behind it. There were no words there, but what was said was incredibly animated.”
—Tony Shafrazi on Keith Haring
Against this, however, is the essential humanism of Haring’s figurative practice. His concern was with universality, developing a idiosyncratic language “made up of synthetic and archetypal signs, that is, signs that are common to all times, places and cultures”ii. There is an immediacy and instant legibility to his freestanding sculpture, and oeuvre more broadly, that has led to his art being considered akin to Pop. Haring also made a monumental version of this sculpture measuring around three metres tall. Intended as a more public sculpture, this variant reflects his roots in the graffiti scene and urban culture of New York. In another way, however, the present work draws on the urban environment of New York, most notably in its evocation of the freedom of movement. Arriving in the city in 1978, the music and nightclub scene proved influential on the artist: “All kinds of new things were starting. In music, it was the punk and New Wave scenes… And there was the club scene – the Mudd Club and Club 57, at St. Mark's Place, in the basement of a Polish church, which became our hangout, a clubhouse, where we could do whatever we wanted”iii. This sensitivity to sensation, time and place informs all of Haring’s works, enlivening form and colour through a bold spontaneity.
At its core, Acrobats asks the viewer to consider human relationships. Poised yet fragile, the two acrobats are held in a tense partnership where each figure relies on the other for stability. In this sense, the present work realises his belief that “the contemporary artist has a responsibility to continue to celebrate humanity”iv. Simultaneously spontaneous yet studied, Acrobats superbly encapsulates Haring’s ability to distil form and movement to a more essential yet lyrical kind of figuration that remains uniquely his own.
