Keith Haring Pop Shop IV (Large Portfolio)

Pop Shop Quad IV is a portfolio of four screenprints created by the artist in 1989 that form a separated and larger edition of the Pop Shop Quad IV. Titled after Haring’s shop of the same name in New York’s SoHo district, which opened in 1986, the quad showcases some of the artist’s best known-motifs which can be traced back to his beginnings as a street artist.  

The first picture of the quad is an angel; Haring had first sketched this figure on a Subway Drawing in 1980, representing life and death. Here, rendered in vivid Pop art colours yellow and red, the angel is again an accessible symbol for Haring. Spirituality is the most prevalent theme in this quad as the angel appears to be worshipped, and in the third picture, another Haring motif, the Radiant Baby is admired by two people. The radiant baby and the angel, ostensibly both figures of purity and goodness - ‘children are the bearers of life in its simplest and most joyous form’ - contrast with the abrasiveness of the sharply drawn barking dogs in the fourth plate. Overall the print shows in Haring’s characteristic playful visual style the dualities between good and bad, peace and oppression that were important to him.