Provenance Keith Haring Foundation, New York Deitch Projects, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner Exhibited Seoul, Arario Gallery, Keith Haring: The Public Artist, December 11, 2002 - February 16, 2003, pp. 14-15 (illustrated) Seoul, Arario Gallery, 20th Anniversary Exhibition, November 10, 2009 - January 24, 2010
Uniting the immediacy of cartoons with the raw dynamism of Art Brut, Jean Dubufet, and Pierre Alechinsky, Untitled, 1984 evinces the precocity of Keith Haring’s pioneering approach from when he was only 26 years old. First and foremost a storyteller, the artist furnishes in the work a world of corporeal distortion à la Salvador Dalí, in which one of Haring’s trademark feature-less fgures imprisons a much larger one using a rope that then metamorphoses into a snake and turns on its master. Executed on an enormous scale redolent of his cherished murals,
Untitled was created afer Haring’s rise to prominence for his grafti drawings in the early 1980s and when he was already a leading fgure in New York’s East Village cultural scene, hobnobbing with art world superstars such as Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Within this community, however, the artist dared to push the boundaries of Pop Art, using idiosyncratic materials such as the vibrant, golden Day-Glo in the present work and circumventing the Manhattan art society by spontaneously drawing in public places such as subway stations. Embodying Haring’s assertion that “living
Keith Haring drawing in the subway, 1984. Photo © Helene Bamberger/Opale/Bridgeman Images, Artwork © The Keith Haring Foundation