Provenance
Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York
Hokin Gallery Inc., Palm Beach
Private Collection, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2017

Auction History
Phillips London: 20 October 2020
Estimated: GBP 1,500,000 – 2,000,000
GBP 1,716,500 / USD 2,222,965
Sold To Benefit the Bedari Foundation

Keith Haring 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

Forming part of a series of rare, larger-than-life masks that Keith Haring executed in 1987, Untitled (Grace Jones Mask) rises over a meter in height, and evinces a vibrant mint green interspersed with looping lines of silver. At the tip of the mask’s triangular composition, a small round red excrescence protrudes into the viewer’s space, delineating the anthropomorphic figure’s discreet mouth. Despite deriving from a body of work that stands out from the rest of Haring’s creative output, the artist’s masks, of which only eight have been created, all in 1987, display a visual blend of chromatic dynamism and formal whimsicality that is distinctly recognizable as his own. Notably, Untitled (Grace Jones Mask) features the artist’s idiosyncratic graffiti lines in enamel paint, as well as cartoonish strokes surrounding the mask’s eyes, mouth and forehead.

Keith Haring, Untitled (Large Goon Mask), 1987. Keith Haring artwork © Keith Haring Foundation

In its quasi-tribal rendering, Untitled (Grace Jones Mask) attests to Haring’s ethnographic investigations into folk art and various cultural expressions, following from a tradition of modern masters – Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Constantin Brancusi, among others – who similarly studied traditional masks and totems in their sculptural and painterly practices. Signifying the masks’ importance and singularity within Haring’s oeuvre, Large Goon Mask, 1987, another example from the artist’s sequence of eight thematic sculptures,  currently resides in the collection of the Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, as part of a permanent loan from the Marx Collection.

Keith Haring, Untitled (Mask with Six Eyes), 1987. Keith Haring artwork © Keith Haring Foundation

As suggested in the work’s title, Untitled (Grace Jones Mask) specifically references the iconic Jamaican model, actress and singer Grace Jones, whom Haring shared a friendship with since their first artistic encounter in 1984 – orchestrated by Andy Warhol and immortalized by Robert Mapplethorpe. Having collaborated with Jones on another project shortly prior the execution of the present work, Haring envisioned the model as the quintessential embodiment of postmodern New York – what the writer Alison Pearlman defined as a ‘futuristic-primitivist style’. Continually inspired by her brash presence and her ability to immerse herself within diverse cultural realms, Haring mingled with Jones in both artistic and social capacities, most frequently locating their joint creative enterprises at the Paradise Garage – New York’s most vibrant discotheque and festive LGBTQ centre. Untitled (Grace Jones Mask), recycling imagery that Haring had used in body-painting sessions with Jones since 1984, and marking a specific nod to the headdress he created for her during their first communal venture, is a rare perennial artefact cementing the two creatives’ visionary friendship.

Keith Haring, Untitled (Burning Skull), 1987. Keith Haring artwork © Keith Haring Foundation

Possibly serving as further inspiration for the present work, Haring recounted a thematically related encounter which coincided with the period during which Untitled (Grace Jones Mask) and its sister works were produced. In March 1987, on a trip to Munich to visit Niki de Saint Phalle’s show, Haring had attended a lunch at which his friend Jean Tinguely, ‘fun as usual!’, had ‘brought masks […] and turned the atmosphere around immediately!’. With Haring’s art frequently being informed by his life (and vice versa), it appears possible that the artist’s unique venture into mask-making – constricted to the year of 1987 – was influenced by this specific event.

Keith Haring, Untitled (Mask with a Long Mouth), 1987. Keith Haring artwork © Keith Haring Foundation

Recording Haring’s friendship and artistic partnership with Grace Jones, Untitled (Grace Jones Mask) was created on the heels of the actress’s important cinematic venture a year prior – the feature film Vamp, in which she played the Queen of Vampires, Katrina. In this film, Jones’s body and face were painted by Haring in eccentric, primary colours – in fine amounting to an appearance that eluded her likeness entirely. In the present work, the sculptural form’s anthropomorphic silhouette, along with its distinct color combination, provide a resounding echo to Katrina’s red hair, red lips and green eyes in Vamp. In addition to the chromatic paint covering her face, Katrina sported Haring’s instinctive and primary lines all over her body, making ‘her look like a tribal queen, dancing for her gods’. With white patterns marking ‘the flow of energy and topography of Jones’s body’, Jones was ‘transformed into a power site’, wrote Miriam Kershaw.

Keith Haring, Untitled (Tongue Man), 1987. Keith Haring artwork © Keith Haring Foundation

Having painted Jones’s body multiple times in the mid-1980s, notably whilst filming the music video for her infamous single ‘I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Perfect for You)’, Haring had never yet dedicated a sculptural object to the model. An exceptional feature within his body of sculptural masks (Haring only dedicated two masks: the other being to his Cubist predecessor Pablo Picasso), Untitled (Grace Jones Mask)’s direct address to Grace Jones denotes the increasingly close relationship the two shared following their first collaboration. After Andy Warhol had orchestrated their artistic introduction for a shoot destined to feature in Interview Magazine in 1984, Haring and Jones continued working together on various projects, most often blending the artist’s painterly endeavors with the model’s striking corporeal presence. About Haring and Jones’ symbiotic collaborations, Miriam Kershaw wrote, ‘Jones’ performances gave dynamic expression to the aesthetic of the 1980s that Haring and Warhol helped to formulate. According to Haring, Jones was a signifier for everything he admired in the global crossroads of postmodern New York’. Indeed, Jones’s body was the ultimate canvas onto which Haring could explore his two foremost aesthetic obsessions: primitive and Pop. The method furthermore presented itself as a natural extension of his ephemeral artistic creations, most famously devised in the streets of New York. Like subway graffiti and wall art, the paint atop Jones’s body could live for just a moment in time before dissolving upon performative completion.

Douglas Kirkland, Keith Haring and Grace Jones in preparation of Vamp, 1986, pigment print on archival paper.
Image: Douglas Kirkland.

A product of his time simultaneously vested with the significance of past art-historical narratives, Haring wove frequent allusions to electronic media, television and cartoons in his work, whilst at the same time infusing imagery from Aztec, Mayan, North African and Aboriginal cultures. As noted by the cultural critic and scholar of African art Robert Farris Thompson, Haring most certainly borrowed from the ritual painting of white stripes on men’s bodies by Masai East Africans in order to create Jones’s costume in her 1984 and 1985 Paradise Garage performances. Equally, the present work’s instinctive aesthetic is undeniably informed by the artist’s longstanding interest in intersecting times and cultures, specifically the fusion of the urban and the ritualistic. Coded with ancestral ethnological signs, and taking the form of an object which for centuries formed part of specific rituals in African tribes, Untitled (Grace Jones Mask) along with its sister works pinpoint the culmination of Haring’s investigation into tribal aesthetics – an allusion rendered explicit by the title of another mask from the present series, Hollywood African Mask.

Keith Haring, Untitled (Hollywood African Mask), 1987. Keith Haring artwork © Keith Haring Foundation.

Sold To Benefit the Bedari Foundation

The Bedari Foundation works with partners to catalyze research, education and cutting-edge solutions to global challenges in mental health, environmental conservation and energy transition. We’re devoted to fostering a world where we minimize harm and maximize nurture for humans and the environment, and strive to empower people to have healthy, harmonious relationships with themselves, others and the planet.

But right now, things are moving in the wrong direction.  The world is out of balance, and both people and the planet are suffering.  More stress and mental health problems, more disconnection and conflict, more planetary damage driven by unfettered consumption. We’re operating in a deficit of care – for ourselves and the earth. But this is where our work begins.

Keith Haring, Untitled (Egg Head for Picasso), 1987. Keith Haring artwork © Keith Haring Foundation