Keith Haring Totem For Sale

Totem is a large-scale woodcut print, comprised of three sheets, created by Haring in 1989. It is one of the few examples of Haring’s work in the medium of woodcut printmaking, and is remarkable for its allusions to the Ancient world. 

The outline of Totem strongly resembles an Egyptian mummy in the shape of its rounded head and square feet. Inside the figure’s outline, humans hold each other up surrounded by crosses and eyes, colliding to create hieroglyphs that are distinctly Haring’s. The crosses and ‘matchstick’ men are seen all throughout the artist’s body of work as motifs, yet when inside the body of Totem, take on a much more esoteric meaning. In the words of critic Ulrike Gehring: ‘his pictorial signs are modules which change meaning depending on their configuration’. 

Whilst Haring often left his works untitled, the present work’s name Totem adds to its significance, meaning an object of respect and worship, often for religious or spiritual reasons. As the Ancient Egyptians mummified their dead for the afterlife, the mummy can be seen as spiritual totem of life and death, which was undoubtedly on Haring's mind in 1989 whilst he was suffering from the AIDS virus.