Keith Haring USA 19-82 Print For Sale

USA 19-82 is a lithograph executed by Keith Haring in 1982. Produced in the same year as Haring’s inaugural exhibition at the Tony Shafrazi gallery, where the young artist would explode on the New York art scene, the print captures the beginning of a now iconic visual lexicon. 

In USA 19-82, a characteristic Haring matchstick figure, bold red and two-dimensional, appears in the centre of the composition, atop a mound of dots. A two-headed snake goes directly through a hole in its abdomen: the hole through the body is a motif seen throughout Haring’s work, seen to represent a metaphorical void. Emerging from the artist’s cartoonish, bold contours is a spiritual undercurrent. Though the lithograph is made up of three, seemingly simple, main pictorial components – the figure, snake and the steps or mound – each one is loaded with potential mythic qualities. Haring’s person appears with radiant beams above his head, a kind of Halo; the artist was in fact raised in a Christian family, going to Church every Sunday, although he would later renounce organised religion. The position of the figure, cross-legged and arms outstretched, recalls the practice of snake-charming. 

Snake charming is a spiritual and hypnotic practice that can be traced from Ancient Egypt, as well as being alluded to in the Bible. That Haring depicts this age old practice, which was found across the world in Africa and Asia, against an American landscape that is only hinted at by a textual signifier (‘USA’ scrawled in thick, inky lettering) – points to the artist’s cross-cultural influences and emphasis on collective, rather than individual experience. At this early stage in his career, the Subway artist’s drawings and prints were replete with a visual vocabulary of love and peace, such as the Heart-Love motif and the Radiant Baby.