Keith Haring Stones 1-5 (Portfolio) For Sale

Stones is a portfolio of five lithographs created by the artist in 1989. Featuring white lines on a black background, the portfolio follows in the style of works such as Labryinth (1989) in its abstract, quasi-tribal configuration. At the time of its creation, Haring was leaning towards a more complex, ambiguous style that contrasts with the popular, easily readable Pop Shop series. Notably, the portfolio still employs his earlier motifs, but reinvents them in an abstract style. 

Each lithograph in the suite is highly distinctive, despite following the same white on black style. Plates one, four and five feature elongated forms that resemble humans in very different incarnations;  as fingers, trees and as animals. Plates two and three are amongst the most geometric, with the labryrinthine plate two resembling a face.  

Haring often left his works untitled. The choice to name the portfolio ‘stones’ is perhaps an allusion to stone sculptures found in Polynesia such as the Moai stones. Statues such as these have similar elongated faces to that of the face in Haring’s plate two, as well as unique body shapes exhibited in the other shapes.  

Much has been said by scholars and critics of Haring’s broad cultural influences: his style is often said to have borrowed from Polynesian, Aboroginal, African and Chinese and Japanese art. The artist’s own take on this differs from this view: ‘I think that pictorial elements are made up of all the concentric circles and curving lines and small figures and patterns possible. It was news to me that they were so similar to the art of the Australian Aborigines’. In the Stones portfolio, Haring expresses an approach to art as a universalist language: he appropriates the same visual vocabulary captured by the Polynesians in a modern context.