Keith Haring Ludo 1-5 (Portfolio) For Sale

Ludo 1-5 is a portfolio of five lithographs created by the artist in 1985. Rendered in black, red and white in the style of other suites of this period, Ludo explores a caricature-like monster. Here Haring’s propensity for line and colour is in full force. 

The portfolio leans towards abstraction. Whilst Haring is widely known for his ‘matchstick’ figures and unique visual lexicon, Ludo seems to be a departure in that he creates figures rather unusual in his body of work. Plate one is the only print that resembles a human figure – a portrait of a body with exaggerated hips. The interior of the figure is embellished with Haring’s red, rune-like swirls, giving the picture a gestural and kinetic character. The second plate depicts a face, angled sideways, chaotic as it is cryptic: its features are strange and surreal. The artist’s next plate features a spiral-figure (a motif seen in Haring’s work that evokes a feeling of movement), with an ‘X’ figure at its centre. The figure in this example is perhaps targeted, in the previous monster’s thrall: this seems to be the case in the last plate, wherein a red hand extends from a hole (almost a vortex), which appears bloodied. 

Visually striking, the shapely forms of the Ludo portfolio recall the visual language of Aztec and Aboriginal cultures for its concentric circles and seemingly primeval, mythological figures. Though this was not acknowledged by Haring himself (‘It was news to me that they were so similar to the art of the Australian Aborigines’), critics and admirers of the artist have pointed out many parallels. Timothy Leary said: ‘I showed his drawings to the Australian aborigines who initiated me and they grinned and nodded their heads.  Keith communicated in the basic global icons of our race’.