Ludwig Museum Shows Keith Haring

The Keith Haring Foundation has brought 80 graphic works and eleven paintings to the Ludwig Museum, and the museum is showing its own Haring: a bronze winged altar. The exhibition is timed to coincide with what would have been the artist's 50^th birthday. Haring died tragically young, of AIDS, at the age of 30.

Looking at Haring's work, it is as if he knew from the beginning that he had little time. He didn't bother with half solutions. He didn't first make sketches and he didn't erase. Whatever came from the brush or out of the tube onto the surface found its place in the picture immediately.

Haring came to the realisation early on that there was no money to be made in institutional art. He involved himself instead with all kinds of pictorial communication, creating images on the walls of the New York subway and on public buildings. Haring did not paint or draw works of art, but stories, secrets, fairy tales and jokes. His images were child-like, outlined in thick black and coloured brightly, without background and without perspective.

Haring's figures are all about action, whether, running, jumping, biting or hitting. Among his figures are gods and demons, snakes and dogs. Inanimate objects also feature regularly in his work: a television, a knife, a thorn, a staff. Blood, the heart and the earth also recur.

Haring developed his own symbolic language, which he used to send messages, about consumer society, or the machine of government cloaked with a veil of democracy.

What is remarkable about Haring's works is that they show a far more fresh and dramatically expressed view of the world than one would believe his short life would have allowed him to achieve.

The Ludwig Museum is showing Keith Haring's works from August 15 until November 18.

Author: Götz Eszter / Photos: Ludwig Museum

Ludwig Museum Shows Keith Haring

English