Keith Haring Pop Shop Quad I For Sale

Pop Shop Quad I is a screenprint executed by the artist in 1987. The print in quad form is from a small edition of 45 compared to his other individuated, larger scale versions of Pop Shop series. The portfolio takes its title from the artist’s famed Pop Shop opened by Keith Haring a year earlier in SoHo, New York. These works capture Haring’s well developed visual lexicon at what can be seen to be the height of his career. 

In Haring’s Pop Shop Quad I, Haring’s idiosyncratic matchstick figures lock hands, dance and embrace each other. Each box contains a miniature narrative of friendship and celebration that reaches its culmination when we view the quad altogether, similar to a comic strip. Haring’s signature bold line and block colours create a visual style that is straightforward for its purpose in delivering its message of unity. But though sparse in detail, Haring’s lines still manage to convey movement, excitement and innocence: in the third square, two figures sitting side by side with their arms around each other have a halo above them. This halo, commonly found as a motif in Haring’s work, is used to express innocence and purity. Likewise in the second square, lines convey the dynamism of the figures’ waving and jumping. Haring went as far to say: ‘Your line is your personality’. The personality of Haring is certainly felt here with the artist’s confident use of colour and form. 

From the start of his career, Haring believed that art should communicate to a mass audience. After moving to New York in 1978, he enrolled at the School of Visual arts and became immersed in the East Village scene. His artistic and social circle was wide and diverse; he was friends with the likes of Jean-Michel Basqiuat, AndyWarhol and Madonna, graffiti artists and young students from the Bronx. It quickly became apparent that Haring desired an artistic career outside of the elite art institutions. Inspired by the graffiti artists, one day he saw the blank advertising boards of the subway: ‘I immediately realised that this was the perfect place to draw’. With only white chalk, Haring famously began what would become known as his Subway Drawings, the beginnings of an iconography which are seen in their mature, printmaking form here.