Keith Haring was born on May 4, 1958, in Reading, Pennsylvania, and died in New York in 1990. He was a painter and writer. It was the comic book characters like those of Walt Disney and Dr. Seuss that had a lasting influence on him.
In 1977, he came into contact with an artist who greatly moved him, giving him the “new push and confidence” necessary to pursue his vocation: this was Pierre Alechinsky, who was featured in an exhibition at the Pittsburgh Art Museum that year. Just a year later, armed with the diverse knowledge he had acquired in the field of art, Haring organized his first solo exhibition, which was a great success. In 1979, he became friends with an emerging artist from Brooklyn: Jean-Michel Basquiat, with whom he remained friends until Basquiat’s death, which occurred two years before his own.
Meanwhile, he moved from Pittsburgh to New York, seeking new challenges and artists with similar ideas and interests. During this period, he became close friends with Kenny Scharf and created several works, blending the influences of Jenny Holzer’s poster Truisms with the techniques of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. In New York, the young painter divided his time between intense study and the entertainments of a big city: Haring, in particular, frequented Club 57, a popular rendezvous for artists, actors, and musicians in Manhattan.
Meanwhile, in June 1980, Haring was invited to participate in the Times Square Show, the first art exhibition dedicated to American underground art. Here, he had the opportunity to interact and form friendships with the most significant exponents of street art, including Lee Quinones, Fab Five Freddy, and Futura 2000. Haring was undoubtedly fascinated and influenced by them, and he openly expressed his enthusiastic passion for graffiti, a theme he revisited in an exhibition set up in 1981 at the Mudd Club, which was a significant success.
While ill, the last public work he created was Tuttomondo, on the exterior wall of the Convent of Sant’Antonio in Pisa. It is Haring’s final ode to life and one of the “most important projects he ever did.”
Despite his premature death, Haring’s imagery has become a universally recognized visual language of the 20th century. His works employ an immediate and festive style and are populated by stylized, two-dimensional characters such as children, dogs, angels, monsters, televisions, computers, cartoon figures, and pyramids. Iconic in this sense is his use of very vivid and attractive colors reminiscent of those used in advertising graphics, and the adoption of a thick, essential outline that encloses the aforementioned figures. His seemingly childlike iconography conveys simple, clear, and immediately intelligible messages addressing various hot topics of his time, such as capitalism, racism, social injustice, apartheid, nuclear rearmament, drugs, and AIDS, while also tackling subjects like love, happiness, joy, and sex.
