Keith Haring

American artist, sculptor and designer Keith Haring was mostly known for his graffiti paintings attracting with their rhythm, sincere and actual style. Like his contemporaries, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf, who were his friends, the artist raised the ordinary street art to the level of high art adding intellectual elements and essential social motives to the ordinary graffiti.

Keith Haring created his first works in New York underground. The metro passengers loved those paintings, and he became famous everywhere around. Using an ordinary piece of chalk to apply pictures on different surfaces, the artist created more and more works, fully changing the composition of his “underground gallery” in one night. From 1984, the artist had to stop experimenting. He started noticing that his paintings disappeared from the walls of subways just a few hours after they were painted. As the name of Keith Haring was becoming more known in New York, resourceful citizens started stealing works from walls and selling them at exorbitant prices.

Keith Haring was a truly people’s artist, whose works are loved by children, representatives of city subculture and intellectuals. His famous “dancing people” still adorn city buildings, clothes, interiors and different household items. This is how the artist implemented the main idea of his work: the art must be open, accessible and understandable to everyone irrespectively of education, race, gender or age.

Apart from painting on the walls of subways and buildings, the artist frequently created works of art of live people painting them from top to down. His most famous body artwork is graffiti on the body of scandalous singer Grace Jones, who performed like that at the popular club «Paradise Garage» in New York. Witnesses claim that the dance of the black singer covered with the white paints was an impressive show.

Keith Haring was an active public figure defending the rights of sexual minorities and vulnerable groups. In 1988, he was diagnosed with AIDS, and then this theme became one of the central topics of his art. His work “Ignorance = fear; silence = death” is against keeping back the scope of this disease and the aggressive attitude of healthy people to the carriers of the infection. The artist created the AIDS fund, which has been working till this day.

Key ideas:

– The art of Keith Haring takes its roots in his childhood’s passion for comics and cartoon characters. The artist used simple, clear lines and elementary forms in his work. But the simplicity of Keith Haring’s drawings is deceptive. His works reveal important social topics such as homophobia, AIDS, racism and drug addiction. The artist drew attention to these problems with the help of lively and vivid images resembling children’s drawings. He was the first to realize that serious issues cannot be hushed up but must be solved with the help of positive methods without overreacting and intimidating the viewer.

– A distinctive feature of the artist’s creativity is the rhythmicity of the image, repetition of similar but not the same elements that fill the entire space of the canvas or other surface and create a kind of graphic maze. Looking at the works of Keith Haring, the viewer feels lightly dizzy from a large number of details and bright, most often contrasting colours.

– Schematically depicted in Haring’s paintings, people are in constant motion. Like in the life of New York at night, in which the artist actively participated, the colourful figures in his paintings converge and diverge, starting from each other or, on the contrary, intertwining like in a passionate dance. Bright little men jump and tumble, enjoying life to the fullest.

– The artist was very interested in the phenomenon of writing. Haring claimed that the letters of any language have their own structure that allows you to express a thought with a minimum number of characters. He created a special system of signs, that is to say, his written policy, which people understand regardless of their nationality and level of education.

– Like Jackson Pollock, Keith Haring turned drawing into a kind of magical ritual, during which the image is poured onto the canvas directly from the author’s subconsciousness. In 1978, Haring videotaped the process of his work. In the video, music plays and the artist paints quickly, creating shapes and rhythmic repetitions of simple forms until there is no free space on the canvas. Surrounded by his drawings on all sides, the artist, squeezed into a corner, becomes himself part of his work, its living continuation.