Keith Haring Untitled 1-6 Portfolio, 1982 For Sale

Untitled is a portfolio of six lithographs created by the artist in 1982, the same year of Haring’s inaugural exhibition at the Tony Shafrazi gallery in New York, which would catapult him to fame overnight. Featuring crucifixions, dogs, spaceships, and televisions, the monochrome portfolio combines the religious with a sci-fi, child-like sensibility. The visual alphabet exemplified in the prints is amongst Haring’s most immediately recognisable. 

The strongest narrative seen in the portfolio is that of the Crucifixion, though its storytelling is far from traditional. Haring was raised in a Christian family, and as a young adult, was affiliated with the Jesus Movement, which have later impact the artist’s work: ‘I was considered a freak – a Jesus freak. I tried to convince others to be born again, but it just annoyed people’. After turning away from the movement and arriving in New York in the 80s, the artist started drawing subway murals in chalk, a fundamentally public and spontaneous approach that was politically and socially conscious. A subway drawing from the same year as the present portfolio (Untitled), depicts a crucified figure inside a TV screen.  

With Haring’s move away from organised religious groups, his depiction of the crucifixion in Untitled is not of Jesus, but of victims crucified in Modern society: this is emphasised by the artist’s idiosyncratic figure who through its primitive form, is always genderless and faceless. In plate 2 and plate 6, dogs with open jaws surround the figure crucified, representing violence and oppression. Dogs also appear in a portrayal of alien abduction scene in plate 4: wherein a flying saucer beams directly onto an anthropomorphic dog. Here, Haring’s angular and disjointed lines –charging from the saucer and beaming onto the dog stood upright, infuse the black and white work with a tangible, pulsating force.  

 Even in his use of cartoonish flying saucers - popular imagery in the 80s – Haring's use of UFO lore is profound. In an interview in Rolling Stone he said ‘the dog is being zapped by a flying saucer. Suddenly it made sense to draw on the street, because I had something to say.. And there was an animal being, which now has evolved into the dog. They really were representational of human and animal. In different combinations they were about the difference between human power and the power of animal instinct.’