Keith Haring The Valley with William Burroughs (Portfolio) For Sale

The Valley is a portfolio of sixteen etchings created by the artist in collaboration with Beat writer William Burroughs. It is the second collaboration between the artist and writer after Apocalypse in 1988, and in many ways can be viewed as a continuation of the portfolio’s surreal, nightmarish subject matter and style. Produced in the twilight of Haring’s career – he was diagnosed with AIDs a year earlier -  the artist departed from some of his best known iconography in the portfolio, replacing it with ‘jesters, masks, martyrs and other religious icons.’ A strong awareness of the AIDs virus and his own mortality merge to imagine a bewildering, post-modern world. 

Contuining with the theme of doomsday as found in Apocalypse, the ‘valley’ is an enclosed space, a kind of human zoo, where people suffering from a virus are quarantined. Burroughs’ text does not name the disease explicitly as AIDs, but Haring depicts the afflicted with visual horror: faces appear to be melting apart, people fall to their deaths, or have incisions made in their abdomen. The severity of AIDs is told in a fictionalised form, but one that expresses the very real violence and magnitude of the epidemic. In the first plate a woman is giving birth whilst two men surround her, about to kill her baby. On a metaphoric level this could point to the dangers of pregnancy with the virus – a subject Haring had treated in the Fertility Suite portfolio in 1983. 

Though the intaglio plates of The Valley are produced in black and white, their appearance is psychedelic in its imagery. The visual syntax of medicine is used alongside futuristic robots who are interviewed, and nearly every figure or object is distorted. The artist unveils the full scope of his imagination as a draughtsman, and it is a far cry from his playful and childlike imagery of the Pop Shop series. The portfolio demonstrates Haring’s fears and concerns as he was approaching the end of his life, not just his about his future, but the future of the world; disease, agriculture and technology. Haring stated of his practice ‘All of the things that you make are a kind of quest for immortality. Because you’re making these things that you know have a different kind of life. They don’t depend on breathing, so they’ll last longer than any of us will.’