Keith Haring Flowers 1-5 (Portfolio) For Sale

Flowers is a portfolio of five silkscreen prints created by the artist in 1990. Produced in the final year before Haring’s tragic death from AIDs-related complications, the series is a colourful and joyous tribute to a portfolio of the same name by Haring’s friend and fellow artist, Andy Warhol. 

Each example in the portfolio features flowers, rendered in an abstract, graffiti style: paint appears to drip from the forms, and Haring’s application of colour is deliberately haphazard and uneven. As with Haring’s human figures in works such as the Pop Shop series, Haring’s stems and flowers morph and bend beyond their usual shapes. Haring makes a common representation in art stylish, lively and contemporary. Though Haring has provided his own unique spin on the work, the influence of Warhol’s Flowers portfolio is felt. In Warhol’s 1970 portfolio, he appropriated photographic images of hibiscus flowers in vivid colours. The orange flower in plate five is similar in remarkably similar in appearance and colourway to Warhol’s hibiscus. Haring said of his friend: ‘Had Andy not broken the concept of what art is supposed to be, I just wouldn’t have been able to exist.’  The artist nevertheless carves out his own legacy by adding his fluid, immediate lines and child-like sensibility to Warhol's subject.