Keith Haring: 1978 1982
dal 26/5/2010 al 18/9/2010
Segnalato da
26/5/2010
Keith Haring: 1978 1982
Kunsthalle Wien, Wien
This exhibition explores the vibrant and experimental years when Haring first enrolled in the School of Visual Arts in New York City, started a diligent and vigorous studio practice, began making public and political art on the city streets, and enjoyed a frenetic social life. Joining an art community outside the institutionalized art system, Haring quickly befriended fellow artists Jean Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf, as well as many of the most innovative musicians, performance artists and graffiti writers of the period.
Curated by Raphaela Platow
'The public has a right to art. Art is for everybody'
Keith Haring
Keith Haring ranks among the most iconic, influential and popular artists in the world. Twenty years after his death,
the Kunsthalle Wien presents a historic exhibition of rarely exhibited early work created during the years immediately
following Haring’s move from his native Pennsylvania to New York City. His passionate immersion in New York’s
dynamic downtown culture informed, inspired and cemented Haring’s language as an artist, his politics and social
conscience, and his open homosexuality.
This exhibition explores the vibrant and experimental years when Haring first enrolled in the School of Visual Arts in
New York City, started a diligent and vigorous studio practice, began making public and political art on the city
streets, and enjoyed a frenetic social life. Joining an art community outside the institutionalized art system, Haring
quickly befriended fellow artists Jean Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf, as well as many of the most innovative
musicians, performance artists and graffiti writers of the period.
Comprised almost exclusively of works on paper and videos, the two media omnipresent in the artist’s oeuvre during
this gestational period, the exhibition delves into aspects of the artist’s life and production that have received
insufficient attention to date: Haring as a thinker and facilitator, and his work as highly experimental and performative.
It traces the development of his visual vocabulary: His influences from Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Alechinsky, Jackson
Pollock and Henri Matisse to William Burroughs as well as Dr. Seuss and Walt Disney; his iconographic inventions
from the rhythmic, all over interlocking geometric shapes to comic inspired, enigmatic narrative storyboards and
humor infused homoerotic tableaux.
The show at the Kunsthalle Wien includes drawings and sketchbooks, videos, flyers, posters, photographs and
subway drawings, as well as word collages, texts, and diaries. It offers an impression of the artist’s manifold maturing
process and shows Keith Haring as a philosopher and untiring initiator of artistic and political activities, reflecting his
collaboration with other artists, his interest in interdisciplinary aesthetic strategies and the pulsating culture of the
time.
Keith Haring, born in Reading, Pennsylvania on May 4, 1958, lived and worked in New York, where he died on
February 16, 1990 of AIDS related complications.
Curated by Raphaela Platow (Director and Chief Curator of the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati). Supporting
Curator at Kunsthalle Wien: Synne Genzmer.
This groundbreaking exhibition of Keith Haring’s early work is co organized with the Contemporary Arts Center
(Cincinnati, Ohio/USA) and will travel there after the Kunsthalle Wien
Information and images: Claudia Bauer
phone: +43 1 521 89 1222, fax: +43 1 521 89 1217
e mail: presse@kunsthallewien.at
Image: Keith Haring, Untitled, 1980 © Keith Haring Foundation
Press conference Wednesday, 26 May 2010, 10 a.m.
Opening Thursday, 27. May 2010, 7p.m.
Kunsthalle Wien
Museumsplatz 1, - Wien
daily 10 a.m. – 7 p.m., Thu 10 a.m – 9 p.m.
Living and working in Vienna III € 8,50 / reduced € 7
Keith Haring € 7,- / reduced € 5,50
Combitickets hall 1 + hall 2
€ 11,50 / reduced € 9,50
Free Admission for Children under 10 years