This show focuses on Keith Haring's early work, created between 1978 and 1982, when Haring left Pittsburgh for New York and began his ascent from art student to international Pop Art star. His move to New York and immersion in downtown culture informed and inspired his language as an artist, his private life, and his open homosexuality.
With its emphasis on works on paper, the show presents drawings and sketches, but also includes videos, flyers, posters, photographs and subway drawings, as well as word collages, texts, and diaries. The show traces the development of his visual vocabulary: His influences from Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Alechinsky, Jackson Pollock and Henri Matisse to William Burroughs as well as Dr. Seuss and Walt Disney; his iconographic inventions from the rhythmic, all-over interlocking geometric shapes to comic-inspired, enigmatic narrative storyboards and humor-infused homoerotic tableaux.
Keith Haring, born in Reading, Pennsylvania on 4 May 1958, lived and worked in New York, where he died on 16 February 1990 of AIDSrelated complications.
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