After Keith Haring

After KEITH HARING (Pennsylvania, 1958–New York, 1990).
“Radiant Baby Neon,” 2024.
LED neon.
Property of Keith Haring, licensed by Artestar, New York 2024.
With original box and packaging.
Measurements: 50 x 36 cm.

Considered the leading figure of 1980s street art, Haring’s unstoppable career—which led him to become a colleague of Warhol and a media superstar—began with his work in the New York City subway. The enormous popularity of Haring’s urban art among New Yorkers quickly caught the attention of the art world. Consequently, Andy Warhol welcomed him into his circle, and the then-up-and-coming gallerist Tony Shafrazi organized a highly publicized solo exhibition for him in 1982 that would mark the launch of his unstoppable success. He soon exhibited his work at the gallery of the influential Leo Castelli and established himself as a star of the professional art world.

Keith Haring was an American artist whose pop art and graffiti emerged from New York City’s street culture in the 1980s. Haring’s work grew in popularity thanks to his spontaneous chalk drawings in the New York City subway, created on black-and-white advertising spaces. After achieving public recognition, he created large-scale works such as murals.His later work often addressed political and social issues—particularly homosexuality and AIDS—through his own distinctive iconography. Today, Haring’s work is held in major private and public collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Bass Museum in Miami; the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Ludwig Museum in Cologne; and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He also created a wide variety of public artworks, including the infirmary at Children’s Village in Dobbs Ferry, New York, and the second-floor men’s lounge at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in Manhattan, which was later converted into an office and is known as the Keith Haring Room. In January 2019, an exhibition titled “Keith Haring New York” opened at New York Law School in the main building on its Tribeca campus.