| Keith
Haring |
|
homepage: http://www.haring.com/
e-mail: info@haring.com |
| Artist Statement |
A pure product of pop culture -- punk, New
Wave, hip-hop, graffiti and break dance -- Keith Haring belongs to
a group of young artists who nourished music and art in New York
during the 1980s.
Keith Haring was driven by a fervent desire to communicate. His work
-- built from an iconic language of signature lines and symbols --
continues to reach out to the broadest of audiences, dissolving the
boundary between fine art and popular culture, between the gallery
and the street. his own vocabulary made of very simple figurative
signs: hearts, babies, dogs and various silhouettes that take on
thousands of different meanings depending on how he put them together.
The rest is history. |
| Biography |
May 4, 1958 - February 16, 1990
At the age of twenty-five, Haring had already invented a gripping,
universally recognized visual language, accessible as much to neophytes
as to connoisseurs. Six years later, he was dead, his blinding
fame coinciding with the progression of the disease that killed
him in 1990, at the age of thirty-one. Haring never hesitated to
become involved in humanitarian causes: the fight against discrimination,
drug abuse, illiteracy and AIDS. Knowing that he was HIV-positive,
Keith also organized exhibtions and performed at Club 57, in the
basement of a church at 57 Saint Mark's Place. He participated in
the Times Square show, an important exhibition of new art held in
New York City, and made the first drawings with flying saucers; animals
and human images that recur in the subway drawings. Haring wanted
to demystify art at any cost and make it universally accessible;
this led him to create countless graffiti.The drawings in the Subway
were quite simple - pyramids, flying saucers, human figures, winged
figures, television sets, animals, and babies. Soon the baby with
rays all around it became a kind of signature, and the people of
New York who rode the subways began recognizing these drawing, although
they had no idea who made them.
|
| Pictures |
|
| |
|