Little people running on the walls, waving and getting tangled up. Without face but whose emotion is palpable.
We are well in the universe of Keith Haring.
Born in 1958 in Reading, Pennsylvania, Keith Haring began his career in Pittsburg where he took courses in commercial graphics before dropping out to enroll in the School of Visual Art in New York.
Keith is a "child of the asphalt", the street, its colors, its culture and its codes feed his work and his imagination. In the street, you have to be fast and good, precise and sure of your gesture. This is how he develops a drawing with fast and rhythmic lines. In the subway, the "underground" environment par excellence, he experiments and meets the artists of the emerging scene: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf whose concerns - war, drugs, racism - touch him.
A thoughtful artist, Keith Haring will work all his life for the social cause. He painted brightly colored frescoes in hospitals, orphanages and on the Berlin Wall. In 1984, his characters will take colors in the vein of Pop Art, conveying an awareness and a message of hope. When he learns in 1987 that he has HIV, he will try to raise awareness of this cause and collect funds through an association to fight against this scourge.
In a desire to address as many people as possible and to make art accessible, he opened his Pop Shop in 1986. A store where toys, t-shirts and posters with the effigies of his icons are sold. An approach that will be reproached by the art world, but which will represent a small artistic revolution, never seen before.
HIV would get the better of him, and Keith Haring died in 1990, leaving behind him a quantity of works, exhibitions and collaborations with other artists from various artistic fields, starting with Andy Warhol, but also Madonna, Grace Jones, Jenny Holzer or Yoko Ono.
