Keith Haring Icons (Portfolio) For Sale

Icons is a portfolio of five individual silkscreen prints, each bearing a single motif for which Haring is widely known. Throughout his short but illustrious career, Haring carefully developed an idiosyncratic visual alphabet that was readily repeated throughout his art, across different mediums. This playful and colourful alphabet captured the public imagination so much that soon his imagery was appropriated commercially and seen all over the world. Acknowledging this popularity, Icons the lifts Haring's best-known motifs from their busy scenes, granting viewers the opportunity to appreciate them as individual characters. The portfolio was also created in Haring’s year of death, and is a strong conclusion and survey of his life’s work in its most condensed form, hence the title 'Icons'.

The ‘Radiant Baby’, seen in plate one, is arguably Haring’s most famous icon, emblematic not only of his own child-like, cartoon style, but the striving for social and political justice in his work. Through the lens of the child, the ultimate symbol of purity and innocence, Haring conveys a powerful message of hope winning against cynicism. The lines emanating from the baby express this special quality, and the artist stated that the baby represented: ‘the purest and most positive experience of human existence’. 

The ‘Barking Dog’, seen in plate two, is an icon that is often presented differently in Haring’s work dependent on its context. Pictured here against a blood-red background, it appears ominous and foreboding. In an Untitled portfolio from 1983, a group of dogs crucify and rule over a human figure in a tale of oppression and subjugation. Although visually direct and flat in expression, Haring’s form of the dog expresses violence in the unusually long jaw of the dog which is out of proportion to its body. 

The angel and devil figures of plate three and four are spiritual symbols of life and death. As with all the examples in Icons, their cartoonish rendering disguises their use in complex issues tackled by Haring’s work such as Apartheid and AIDs.  

Much like Haring's 'Retrospect' screenprints of 1989, 'Icons' is a kind of visual summary and self-reflection for the artist of his own ouevre.