Keith Haring

Keith Haring (Reading, 1958 – New York, 1990) was an American pop art artist and activist. He began his artistic journey by drawing with chalk on empty billboards in the New York subway in the early 1980s. His works carry messages of love, equality, social justice and the fight against AIDS, from which he himself died at the age of 31.

Haring reflected the spirit of his time. He did not express his resistance to war, oppression and environmental destruction only in museums. He also wrote his political messages in the corridors of the New York subway, on the pavements and façades of buildings. In the short period of his artistic activity, he achieved unprecedented world fame.

He drew continuously. Sometimes he would create up to forty drawings in the subway in just one day.

He didn’t sign them because he believed that the drawings were a kind of signature in themselves, “Because they were so sensitive, people didn’t touch them, they respected them; they did not erase or destroy them. That is what gives them their very own strength. This chalk-white, fragile something in the midst of all this power and tension and violence emitted by the subway.”

Keith Haring developed a distinctive visual language of simple lines, which emerged from a synthesis of the primitive art forms of Paul Klee and the expressive means of street art. His drawings of dancing people, crawling babies and barking dogs have become world-renowned. Haring’s visual sign language runs through his entire oeuvre like an alphabet of colours and shapes, acting as a precursor to the emoticons we exchange on smartphones today.