Liberating the Soul: Keith Haring’s Paintings

Capturing Haring’s enduring concerns for global harmony, accessible healthcare amid the AIDS crisis, and the role of art as an expression of joy and communion, the exhibition marks the first time in ten years that Gladstone has dedicated a show exclusively to Haring’s canvases and painted tarps. Haring is renowned for his pop-inflected subway drawings and public art projects based on an enduring conviction that art should be accessible to everyone. He is also recognized as a painter of powerful, emotionally charged canvases, which vibrate with evocations of joy and humor, but in other instances, critique the world’s injustices. An avid student of art history and keen interlocuter with his artistic peers, Haring cultivated a rich, formal painting practice in addition to his more outward-facing activities. Fusing his political activism with a spirit of gay pride, two large canvases from 1985—pre- dating the artist’s own diagnosis of H.I.V. and AIDS—revel in safe sex practices using graphic visual terms. They imagine a life of unbounded freedom and celebration in a world devoid of homophobia. Initially documented among the so-called “high-risk” groups—gay males, heroin addicts, and immigrants—AIDS was marginalized in America during the 1980s as a disease of “the other.” It wasn’t until members of the LGBTQ+ community mobilized to educate (and empower) themselves to demand immediate care that federal attention began to shift from containment to cure. Haring was an engaged member of the activist organization Act Up, which advocated for access to medical research and transparency in treatment. These large- scale, buoyant paintings are particularly relevant today as LGBTQ+ rights are increasingly under siege in the U.S., and AIDS treatment in developing nations, long a priority of the government, has been curtailed due to dramatic shifts in ideology. Much of Haring’s work is infused with personal content, reflecting upon his own life as an artist in a rich community of creatives including musicians, graffiti artists, writers, and activists. A Pile of Crowns for Jean-Michel Basquiat is a large triangular painting featuring a tower of crowns—Basquiat’s signature motif—an elegiac expression of loss after the artist’s death from an overdose in DPEE. Basquiat and Haring were close, having each started their careers as street artists in early DPEWs, quickly rising to fame and achieving economic success, yet never abandoning their instincts for provocation and visual poetry. The pyramidal construction at the center of the trilateral canvas forms a monument to Basquiat’s towering creative genius and a testament to Haring’s deep respect for his fallen friend. In a separate vein, the Untitled canvas from 1989—the artist’s last painting—evinces the more jubilant side of Haring’s practice in its abstracted, all-over-patterning, which, on close inspection, reveals a repeating figure with arms outstretched, signaling an expression of elation—its interlaced limbs referencing the idea of community. The imagery suggests a euphoric crowd, coalescing in the fight against oppression and suffering that so motivated Haring’s artistic vision. This painting is a remarkable, late-career example of Haring’s fluid line- drawings of intertwined human figures, perhaps the most iconic aspect of his work. Throughout his practice, he was captivated by intricate surface patterns and bold color combinations juxtaposing warm and cool hues to create vibrant, entwined imagery. Haring collated visual influences from all over the world in his work, ranging from the dizzying effects of late-GWth -century digital culture to Aztec, Mayan, North African, and Aboriginal iconography. Untitled is a perfect fusion of the varying sources that Haring translated into his signature painting style. Keith Haring was born on May H, DPQE in Reading, Pennsylvania and died at the age of thirty- one of AIDS-related illnesses in New York City in DPPW. Since his death, his work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions around the world, including Bozar, Brussels, Belgium; Museum Folkwang, Essen Germany; Tate Liverpool; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the de Young Museum, San Francisco; the Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Whitney Museum of American Art; Castello di Rivoli, Italy; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Haring’s work is included in major private and public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; The Bass Museum, Miami; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

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