Keith Haring Retrospect (Colour) For Sale

Retrospect is a silkscreen print created by the artist in 1989. It is one of two identical works with the same title, and is the colour version from an edition of 75.  Retrospect illustrates Haring’s truly prolific career by combining his immediately recognisable visual lexicon of the Pop Shop prints into a single, large scale work. Haring had divided his Pop Shop Quads into grids of four pictures; presently, twenty-four scenes are arranged into four rows, creating an exciting microcosm of the artist’s world. Years worth of experimentation culminates in this magnificent combination of pictures that resemble a comic strip, creating side-by-side narratives. 

In Retrospect, Haring’s best-loved motifs are seen: interlocking matchstick men, barking dogs and the Radiant baby (crawling child). Vividly coloured in red, orange, blue yellow, green and pink, the vitality of the characters is felt: they are seen in nearly every possible position – bending, jumping, swimming and riding horses and dolphins. Unlike some of Haring’s earlier portfolios or lithographs, pictures from Pop Shop veers away from explicit socio-political messages. Instead, they depict scenes of harmony between people and animals that are easily readable: ‘My shop is an extension of what I was doing in the subway stations, breaking down the barriers between high art and low art’.  

This breaking down of high and low art is reflected not only in the work’s content but in its method of screenprinting. Haring had first experimented with screenprinting in 1983, and the medium easily lent itself to commercial reproduction with its quick transfer process. Haring was not only aware of, but encouraged the commercialisation of his work, stating that: ‘[It surprised me] that the work, as early as 1982, which was before I had any exhibitions…had already spread throughout the world. People saw it as something that wasn’t really by one artist but was a vocabulary open to anyone.’ 

At the time of the work’s creation in 1989, Haring was approaching the end of his fruitful career, having tragically been diagnosed with AIDs a year earlier. Retrospect is an important survey of the artist’s accomplishments not just for viewers, but for Haring personally.