Keith Haring’s Untitled (Acrobats) is an exuberant, monumental work that succinctly displays in bold colors and in three-dimensions the remarkable pictorial language that came to define the artist’s groundbreaking oeuvre. Having emerged as an artist on the streets and subways of New York at the start of the 1980s, Haring soon rose to fame as a natural draftsman and visual urban poet through the subway drawings: simple, humorous and thought-provoking chalk images on black paper pasted up alongside the ubiquitous advertising posters on the New York underground. These posters also allowed him an outlet for self-expression by doctoring the images and attaching false headlines; ‘subvertising’ as it became known. Having developed his own socially conscious and pop culture-inspired iconography over the following years through murals, paintings, graffiti and design, Haring announced himself as a sculptor of staggering ability on October 26, 1985 at an exhibition of his sculptural works at Leo Castelli’s Greene Street Gallery in New York. This latest development came as a fundamental step forward for Haring’s own personal sense of his career and the visual development of his inimitable style. Cut from steel and brilliantly lacquered in eye-catching, pop colors, these pieces were intentionally designed for public interaction to the extent that Haring smoothed off the edges, painted them in the colors of children’s toys and encouraged their installation in public places. By keeping the image structurally refined these works are lent a totemic yet lyrical delicacy that is remarkably balanced and instantly recognizable on both the conscious and experiential level.
“The public needs art, and it is the responsibility of a ’self-proclaimed artist’ to realize the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for the few and ignore the masses…I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached. The viewer creates the reality, the meaning, the conception of the piece. I am merely a middleman trying to bring ideas together.”
The present work is typical of the artist’s desire to integrate into the community, to touch people’s lives with both his passion for the work and the socially activist message inherent in his articulate and compelling technique. In this aspect of his work it is possible to see Haring attempting to create a memorial for posterity out of the MTV inspired culture of the day. He displayed a deep desire to make sense of a turbulent period in the history of America’s attempts to come to terms with divisive issues such as the Civil Rights movement, homosexuality and AIDS and to link his own oeuvre to that goal. More than anything, sculpture gave him the wherewithal to make the attempt.
1. Acrobats (Large size)
Untitled (Acrobats)
Medium: Polyurethane enamel on aluminum
Year: 1986
Dimensions: 97 1/2 x 56 1/2 x 56 1/2 inches (247.7 x 143.5 x 143.5 cm)
Edition: 5
Artist’s Proofs: 1
Incised with the artist’s signature and stamped with the date 1986 and number on the base
Auction Results
Sotheby’s New-York: 17 November 2017
Estimated: USD 700,000 – 1,000,000
USD 915,000
KEITH HARING
Untitled (Acrobats), 1986
Polyurethane enamel on aluminum
Incised with the artist’s signature and stamped with the date 1986 and number AP 1/1 on the base
This work is the artist’s proof from an edition of 5, plus 1 artist’s proof
2. Acrobats (Medium size)
Acrobats
Medium: Polyurethane enamel on aluminum
Year: 1986
Dimensions: 48 1/2 x 33 x 31 inches (123.2 x 83.8 x 78.7 cm)
Edition: 7
Artist’s Proofs: 2
Stamped with the artist’s signature and foundry mark
Numbered and dated on the base
Keith Haring’s Acrobats, from 1986, stands tall (at over four feet in height) as a jubilant sculpture with lively dancing acrobatic figures in structural harmony. Haring’s firm believe that “the contemporary artist has a responsibility to continue celebrating humanity” transformed the present work from a mere representation of Haring’s creative genius and technical prowess to a lasting emblem of the artist’s keen ability to introduce bright, inspiring imagery as a key voice in the fight against the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and beyond (D. Drenger, ‘Art and Life: An Interview with Keith Haring,’ in Columbia Art Review, Spring 1988, p. 63).
Dance was a large part of the 1980s New York scene, and played a large part in Keith Haring’s life and artistic production. His first encounter of combining elements of dance in his work was in 1978, when he made Video Clones, a video of Molissa Fenley, a modern dancer, where he focused solely on her foot movements. He also incorporated the theme of dance into certain early drawings and paintings, such as his 1982 work Subway Drawing (Electric Boogie Dancer). At times, Haring would use his friend Bill T. Jones, an accomplished dancer, as his reference in showing movement in his works.
Haring’s venture into sculpture came relatively late in his short but meteoric career. In 1985, prompted by the gallerist Tony Shafrazi, who suggested to him “Put your alphabet in the landscape, out there in the real world”, he produced a series of free-standing and brightly colored figures that children were encouraged to play on so that the installation had “the atmosphere of a wild playground” (T. Shafrazi, quoted in Keith Haring: Sculptures, Paintings and Works on Paper, exh., cat., Ben Brown Fine Arts, London, 2005, p. 22). Haring’s sculptures made during the 1980s also appropriate elements of dance, some portraying actual moves of the time, such as the electric slide and the spider move. The present Acrobats acts as a dynamic portrayal of two figures in exaggerated kinetic balance, further reflecting Haring’s passion for the music, dance and nightlife of his era. Haring’s roommate in the early 1980s, Kenny Scharf, once stated, “From the first moment we met, dance was very much a part of our lives. We first revolved around the B-52s. We followed them everywhere, dancing for hours. We danced space-age go-go, the jerk, [and] the pony” (K. Scharf, quoted in Keith Haring, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, 1997, p. 214). Haring has imbued within this sculpture a triumvirate of life, vigor and movement. The play between the two dimensionality and three dimensionality of the work makes the sculpture lose the stiff, static aspects of traditional sculpture, instead celebrating the interplay of vibrant colors is playful and memorable geometries. The medium was radically different from his paintings and early chalk drawings, and this translation into cut metal added a further layer of reality to his work. The fabricated sculptures, employing recognizable human forms, contain an essence of inner life–a concern with stress, repose, substance and void, balance, arrested motion and horizontal versus vertical thrust.
Acrobats carries an added meaning, one of empathy, perseverance and defiance. The AIDS epidemic had an immense effect on the New York art scene of the 1980s, with many artists either knowing someone who had the disease or having it themselves. Being an openly gay artist addressing sociopolitical issues in his work, Haring saw the fight for AIDS research and treatment as a topic close to his heart; he was diagnosed with it in 1988. This work, in many ways, can be seen as a monument with socio-political groundwork underlying its more playful visual appearance. Creating this work in his well-known simplified, childlike, cartoonish style, the present work seeks to put human faces on a disease that had taken so many, and on a sensitive topic that many of the time still feared addressing. Acrobats seems not to lament the AID epidemic; rather, it is one that celebrates Haring’s life and the passion of his New York circle. It was also important to Haring to give back to the larger art community. Many of his public works were placed in locations with many children. He created murals and sculptures in the U.S. and Europe, in such locations as the Necker Children’s Hospital in Paris, the San Antonia Church in Pisa and the Carmine Street Swimming Pool in New York.
Auction Results
Christie’s New-York: 18 May 2017
Estimated: USD 400,000 – 600,000
USD 427,500
KEITH HARING (1958-1990)
Acrobats, 1986
Polyurethane enamel on aluminum
Stamped with the artist’s signature and foundry mark
Numbered and dated ‘K Haring 1986 6/7’ (on the base)
This work is number six from an edition of seven plus two artist’s proofs