Lot Essay
“His work is like his life: varied, headlong and purposeful. Within his easily accessible pictorial language, Haring experimented at the formal level with a whole spectrum of stylistic possibilities. These range from figures reduced to just a few strokes to works covering the whole of the surface in question. From the point of view of content, he drew on a repertoire, which, at its core, speaks of love and happiness, joy and sex, but also of violence, abuse and oppression. (He) always believed in the power and ability of art to change the world…He understood himself as an intermediary between the world of art and the streets of New York…It was from this very personal environment that he drew his motifs.” (A. Kolossa, Keith Haring, 1958-1990: A Life for Art, Cologne, 2004, p. 8).