“It was the idea of making the movements I was doing into a kind of choreography – a kind of dance. I was thinking that the very act of painting placed you in an exhilarated state.”
Dazzlingly vibrant and brimming with graphic positivity, Keith Haring’s Untitled of 1987 is emblematic of the compositional dynamism and iconic figuration from one of the most upbeat and confident artistic voices of our t.mes . Created in the final years of Haring’s life, Untitled is a seminal example of the artist’s distinct visual language, and his determination to celebrate music, movement and an interconnected human spirit through his art-- despite the overwhelming challenges of the decade. Across the monumental tarp, Haring depicts three tiers of interlocking figures in a moment of spectacular activity, rendered in the bold, simplistic chromatic pallet for which he is best known. Commissioned by renowned gallerist Martin S. Blinder for the Martin Lawrence Gallery 1987 annual calendar, the present work has remained in the private collects ion of famed Tony Shafrazi since it was acquired in 1995. Since its completion, the present work has been exhibited among Haring’s most prominent exhibitions, including his solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 1997, The Keith Haring Show at Fondazione Triennale di Milano in 2005, and was exhibited extensively at Shafrazi’s own Chelsea gallery, including the 20-year memorial show commemorating Haring’s tragic passing in 2010. Exemplary of the vibrant urban environment by which Haring’s oeuvre was so heavily inspired, Untitled endures as a record of the artists’s prolific career.
At once highly structural and dizzyingly dynamic, Untitled epitomizes Haring’s unique pop vernacular and effusive spirit. Within the present work, a towering collects ive of three gesturing figures rises in bold blue and searing red against a brilliant yellow backdrop. This iconic work utilizes several symbolic themes within Haring’s signature painterly lexicon, including the stylized stick figure with a hole in their stomach, a signature motif in Haring’s work after John Lennon was shot and tragically killed in 1980. Balanced on top of each other, the stacked figures are posed in a moment of intense gestural movement, recalling the B-Boys and break dancers native to Haring’s surroundings in downtown New York. For Haring, the dance move becomes a broader symbol of life and coexistence. Robert Farris Thompson has described Haring’s employment of dancers coming together, as exhibited in the present composition, as “not.mes rely dancing. They are living a principle: work with your brother, share space in relation to t.mes . Haring expands on that. It turns into an emblem." (Robert Farris Thompson, Haring and the Dance, Keith Haring, New York, 1997, p. 218) At once vibrantly expressive and lyrically balanced, the present work performs with a potent energy. The interlocking dancing figures, inextricable conjoined through head and torso, emanate a pulsating movement that reverberates in waves over the monumental canvas.
"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 t.mes —was that there was a really conceptual base behind it. There were no words there, but what was said was incredibly animated."
Densely packed within the borders of the painting, the burgeoning figures of the present work stand as an early articulation of Haring’s 1988 Growing series, in which the artist further experimented with the boundaries of his own symbolism. Having developed a significant body of visual motifs and iconography, Haring began to play with his own visual language, creating endlessly intricate, hieroglyphic-like symbols in a web of interconnecting, individual figures. In the present work, we see Haring begin to conceptualize the limitations of his iconic figurations: enormous arms press against the left and right edge of the picture plane, framing the parallel limbs of the receding figures that themselves arise from the largest figures' shoulders. The interconnected bodies serve to extend the metaphorical bounds of Haring’s pathos: his search for a unity of human spirit through active expression.
Three years prior to the execution of the present work, the arts community in New York was ravaged by the tragic development of the AIDS epidemic in New York. Even in the face of AIDS, a disease to which Haring himself succumbed tragically in 1990, the present work retains the artist’s distinct positive energy; rather than devolving into injury, misery, anxiety, or death, Untitled illustrates Haring’s unique appreciation of human relationships and intense, receptive embrace of all walks of life. As Henry Geldzahler observed, “It was in the face of this tragic dimension that Keith’s generosity and love of his audience was played out, above all in the spontaneity and high energy of his work right up to the end; Keith produced a tuneful art that sets us humming.” (Henry Geldzahler cited in Exh. Cat., St. Louis, Philip Samuels Replica Handbags , Keith Haring, 1990)
A test.mes nt to its significance within Haring’s extensive oeuvre, the present work has remained in the collects ion of renowned gallerist and close friend of Haring, Tony Shafrazi since 1995. Tony Shafrazi and Keith Haring’s relationship began at the very inception of Haring’s career, when he joined Shafrazi as a gallery assistant in 1980 at the age of twenty-one. Only discovering of Haring’s profound artistic abilities after being invited to see Haring’s work at a small exhibition of bourgeoning downtown artists, Shafrazi recalls a gripping fascination with the artist’s work from the moment he first encountered his early drawings: “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 t.mes —was that there was a really conceptual base behind it. There were no words there, but what was said was incredibly animated.” (Tony Shafrazi, John Gruen, Keith Haring: The Authorized Autobiography, 1991, p. 60-61) In the decade to come, the two would continue to foster their personal and professional relationship: between hosting Haring’s first solo exhibition in 1982, to exhibiting his work long after his passing in 1990, Shafrazi was a consistent and prominent supporter of his iconic work. A prominent part of Shafrazi’s collects ion for the past 27 years, Untitled August 27 standing as a test.mes nt to this remarkable friendship.
In its astonishingly assured compositional structure and daring experimentation of his own visual syntax, Untitled epitomizes Keith Haring’s prolific artistic legacy. Compositionally dynamic yet simplistically rendered, the present work embodies the visceral creative energy and sense of possibility that existed within the New York cultural scene for a brief but heady period during the 1980s, and superbly encapsulates Haring’s own aesthetic maturity of the late 1980s.
