E xecuted in 1983, Keith Haring's Untitled represents the unencumbered spirit of urban art with the elegance of Replica Handbags forwhich the artist is best known. Keith Haring was among the first group of artists to successfully transition from the streets to the gallery, shaking up the 1980s art scene with his idiosyncratic and instantly recognizable visual language. Towards the end of 1983, Haring began experimenting with wood panels, discovering a method to carve his trademark lines into the surface of the material to create a three dimensional effect. He learned about the process from his friend Kermit Oswald, whose father was a carpenter. Using a wood router, a specialized power tool used to hollow out or incise wooden surfaces, Haring was able to quickly and efficiently carve intricate patterns into wood panels. Untitled was part of this sensational new body of work created for the now legendary exhibition at Tony Shafrazi Gallery which took place at the end of 1983 and into 1984. Haring unveiled a series of extraordinary enamel on wood paintings and sculptures. The memorable show was particularly noteworthy for the artist’s radical exhibition design, covering the walls in spray paint, and hanging the works on top, resulting in an installation that resembled an immersive Haring Gesamtkunstwerk. The artworks that were included in this boundary breaking show have since been regarded as some of the preeminent and influential works in his oeuvre.
Recent Exhibitions Featuring Keith Haring’s Untitled
In the early 1980s Haring was at the height of his powers, gaining recognition for the originality and distinctiveness of his quirky figurative line paintings. Haring learned about semiotics while studying at the School of Visual Art in New York and was fascinated by the use of images to communicate ideas. He had a particular interest in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and sought to develop his own contemporary vernacular featuring widely recognizable contemporary symbols and self-created motifs including the barking dog or simplistic featureless human figures.
The art world took note, and in 1982 he achieved his breakthrough by securing a coveted invitation to participate in the hugely significant documenta 7 in the German city of Kassel, where his work was contextualized among the leading figures of his generation, including Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Andy Warhol. In 1983 invitations to São Paulo Biennale in Brazil, and the Whitney Biennial in New York followed, cementing his place as one of the main protagonists of the Pop art movement.
With its imagery, palette, and precision, Untitled marks the culmination of Haring’s carved wood works. Here he shapes the wood panel to resemble a running figure, with the figure’s left hand rendered to resemble a barking dog’s head. The panel is painted in black enamel with intricate carvings highlighted in fiery red paint. The carvings themselves feature an array of Haring’s best-known imagery that reveals a bleak assessment of society during the artist’s lifet.mes . The imagery includes repeated depictions of the key themes that preoccupied American Pop artists, such as critical responses towards capitalism, consumerism, mass media, and unprecedented technological advancement. For example, a large computer with a brain dominates the figure’s head, multiple references to television on the torso, left arm, and right knee reflect America’s media fixation, an exploding head with dollar signs for eyes is etched into the figure’s torso, warning of the consequences of greed. Haring also created the figure at a scale that resembles life size, lending it an eerie sense of believability and additional poignance.
“Red is one of the strongest colors, it’s blood, it has a power with the eye.”
A test.mes nt to the work’s importance, Untitled has been a key component of scores of museum exhibitions around the world, including seminal shows at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, in Paris; the De Young Museum, San Francisco; the Albertina Museum, Vienna; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and it has been earmarked for inclusion at the Broad Museum’s upcoming Keith Haring exhibition in Los Angeles in 2023.
Taken as whole, Untitled amounts to an iconic artwork that is highly representative of the artist’s practice and embodies Haring’s boundless creativity and expressive talent. Like all of of his most accomplished work, Untitled is filled with a complex web of the artists’s proprietary primitive symbolism and iconography, which was influenced by ancient cultures and reinterpreted for contemporary audiences. The resulting composition straddles the delicate balance of effortlessly appearing primeval and contemporary at the same t.mes , and indicates his unrivaled ability to process and respond to his surroundings through his artwork.
