Keith Haring (1958-1990)

“[Keith Haring’s] images are insightfully chosen and carefully worked out with a sensitivity toward layers of meaning and sexual connotation. They are not just drawings but ‘signs.’ But these rings of meaning around the individual figures are only part of the Haring process. The work’s full impact results from a mélange of all these elements: context, medium, imagery; and their infiltration into the urban consciousnesses. Individual frames may appear perfectly innocent, but taken together, Haring’s works have a quality of menace, a sense of impending violence and of sexual exploitation. They diagram the collective unconscious of a city—a city that moves along happily enough, but just barely enough to keep from degenerating into the dog-eat-dog, topsy turvy world of Haring’s images.” Jeffrey Deitch, Keith Haring, New York, 2008, pp. 220-221.