Untitled

Details

Provenance:
Gallery Ernst Hilger, Vienna; Privately owned, Austria, acquired from the aforementioned before 2002.

Description

– Very rare unique piece in neon orange from the early days of the Subway Drawings

– Typical dynamic motif with “barking dogs” and fleeing people, highly recognisable

– Privately owned for over 20 years, on the international auction market for the first time

– Works like this establish him as one of the most important American artists of the late 20th century to this day

There is hardly an artist with a higher recognition value than Keith Haring. The symbolic and visual language he invented reflects the joie de vivre of an entire generation and has influenced graphic design and pop culture like no other. Haring’s beginnings as a street artist, his graffiti in the streets of New York and his legendary subway drawings led to his rapid fame, also in the art scene. The ray babies and barking dogs, painted or drawn with angular strokes, soon became a symbol of joie de vivre and freedom.

In the early 1980s, Haring tried to bring the street into the gallery by choosing alternative surfaces that reflected the urban environment in which he had previously moved. In 1982, he made his gallery debut at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in Soho with an extremely popular and highly acclaimed solo exhibition. One critic wrote at the time that this show was the Haring epic, part one. With all the scenes, fragments, motifs and media brought together and structured graphically and architecturally for the first time. The present work “Untitled” dates from the same year and it is conceivable that it was an exhibit of this legendary exhibition. The work is based on a simple wooden board painted in bright neon orange. A short, concise scene is quickly drawn on it with an angular felt-tip pen stroke without setting it off: Two barking dogs with human bodies are chasing a man running away. Three figures that are outlined in a quick gesture and yet tell a whole story. Even 42 years after its creation, the work has lost none of its conciseness and topicality.