Sold for: $79,250

PROVENANCE
Martin Lawrence Galleries, New York
Acquired from the above by the present Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
Klaus Littmann, Keith Haring: Editions on Paper 1982-1990, The Complete Printed Works, New York, 1993, reproduced on cover and page 32, listed page 30

In his too-brief life (1958-90) and career, Keith Haring developed a highly recognizable as well as both commercially and critically successful form of pop art that has had a lasting impact on the art world. His neon colours, iconic forms such as the ‘radiant child’, and his nervously kinetic graphic style make his work instantly recognizable and memorable. Cognate with the older Andy Warhol, Haring was comprehensive in his attention to and then redistribution of popular imagery, whether from the street, advertising, club culture in New York City, or television. Like Warhol, his New York fellow traveller Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88), and collaborator Kenny Scharf (1958- ), however, Haring did more than replicate the vibrancy of urban society. He created his own language of icons and spun them into a lasting activist commentary on contemporary social issues, especially HIV /AIDS in the 1980s (complications from which led to Haring’s early death).

Haring came to early prominence as a subway artist in New York in the 1970s and early 1980s and increasingly took this edgy sensibility into gallery and museums settings and into the international art scene, including appearances at Documenta 7, the São Paulo Biennial, and the Whitney Biennial. Drawing was his passion. As it did for Warhol, the screen printing that we see here allowed him to reproduce his signature linear, highly coloured techniques while maintaining the sense of an autograph work. Fertility Suite 2 is part of his five-part fertility series of 1983, works now recognized as central to his reputation. The series takes on a particularly topical and tragic aspect of the HIV/AIDS crisis only coming to be known at this time, its widespread infection of pregnant women in Africa. We witness cartoonish flying saucers relentlessly attacking a pyramid. To the lower left, a pregnant figure throws up her arms in self-defence and alarm at this seemingly unprovoked invasion. Focused on women and on Africa, the work is also personal. Haring had been diagnosed with HIV in the early 1980s and was contending with the conflicts of exuberant sexuality and the devastating effects of the disease. We readily feel the tension of these poles in Fertility Suite 2: the woman could at first be seen to be dancing, as others in the series clearly are, but the invaders are violently infecting the entire scene with the virus. We see flecks on the pyramid and ground. The woman’s body remains uninf(l)ected, so far.

Haring documents life, fear, resilience, and hope. The visual joy in work such as Fertility Suite 2 keeps us looking and thinking. He established The Keith Haring Foundation in 1989 to extend such beneficial results through art: “The Foundation concentrates its giving in two areas: the support of organizations which enrich the lives of underprivileged children and the support of organizations which engage in education, prevention, and care with respect to AIDS and HIV infection.”

We thank Mark Cheetham, Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto and author of two books on modern and contemporary abstract art, The Rhetoric of Purity and Abstract Art Against Autonomy, for contributing the above essay.

From the edition of 100; there were also 15 artist's proofs. Published by Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York.

This work is accompanied by a copy of the catalogue Keith Haring: Editions on Paper 1982-1990, The Complete Printed Works, where it is featured on the cover.

Please note: the full sheet size is 42 x 50 inhces.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars

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