Keith Haring The Blueprint Drawings Series For Sale

The Blueprint Drawings is a large collection of seventeen works produced over a period of weeks in 1980, and were revisited in the final year of Haring’s life, 1990. Ambitious in scale and execution, the prints are from photostats of original drawings by Haring which he did with Sumi ink on vellum. The Blueprint Drawings are unique for their medium – used by Haring for the first time, as well as their reinvention of motifs often used by the artist. Arguably the scenes portrayed in the portfolio are some of the most visually arresting and stark in Haring’s oeuvre. 

A violent and chaotic tone permeates the collection. Haring’s figures tumble down stairs, are eaten and attacked by dogs, and are hung from their feet. Fear is felt as they run away from the dogs, and spaceships, broadly signifying ‘otherness’ and a non-human power. In the second plate in the series, a mass of people appear to be attacked by spaceships. A heap of bodies appears beneath a staircase, from which a decapitated body hangs. It is a gruesome and unequivocal picture of death, which was inevitably on the artist’s mind as he suffered from the AIDs virus and watched it sadly claim the lives of many of his friends and fellow artists. 

The arrangement of each scene on the large-scale print resembles a comic-strip in its grid-like format. Different plates have varying sizes, with plate seven for instance focussing on one scene, emphasising the victim’s torture. Haring had followed this format in his Pop Shop Quads, but here the child-like strip is in direct contrast to the grisly and explicit subject matter.