Pop Shop Quad IV (Littman p.142) For Sale

Pop Shop Quad IV is a silkscreen print created by the artist in 1989 presenting a series of four pictures in grid form. Titled after Haring’s shop of the same name in New York’s SoHo district, which opened in 1986, the quad showcases some of the artist’s best known-motifs which can be traced back to his beginnings as a street artist.  

The first frame of the quad depicts an angel; Haring had first sketched this figure on a Subway Drawing in 1980, representing life and death. Here, rendered in vivid Pop art colours yellow and red, the angel is again an accessible symbol for Haring. Spirituality is the most prevalent theme in this quad, as an angel as well as a baby are worshipped. The 'radiant baby' and the angel, ostensibly both figures of purity and goodness - ‘children are the bearers of life in its simplest and most joyous form’ - contrast with the abrasiveness of the sharply drawn barking dogs in the last picture. The fourth Pop Shop quad in the series wonderfully exhibits, in Haring’s characteristically playful style, the weighty dualities between good and bad, peace and oppression, themes of central importance to his work.