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Lot Essay
“A more holistic and basic idea of wanting to incorporate [art] into every part of life, less as an egotistical exercise and more natural somehow. I don’t know how to exactly explain it. Taking it off the pedestal. I’m giving it back to the people, I guess.” – Keith Haring
Keith Haring, like many of his generation—including his contemporary Jean-Michel Basquiat—eschewed traditional gallery representation, taking instead the streets of New York as his exhibition space. His early chalk drawings, pasted over peeling advertisements on the subway, and paintings on fence poles, doors, awnings and even trash cans instantly captured the public’s imagination. As an artist who always privileged the fragment over the whole, Keith Haring’s Totem, the present lot, is painted on a city door removed from its utilitarian purpose and adorned with Haring’s signature iconography. For Haring, schooled in the rigors of post-structuralism, these characters were conceived in semiotic terms: parts of a larger linguistic whole, which could be dissembled, disassociated and rearranged according to the artist’s poetic logic.
Keith Haring, like many of his generation—including his contemporary Jean-Michel Basquiat—eschewed traditional gallery representation, taking instead the streets of New York as his exhibition space. His early chalk drawings, pasted over peeling advertisements on the subway, and paintings on fence poles, doors, awnings and even trash cans instantly captured the public’s imagination. As an artist who always privileged the fragment over the whole, Keith Haring’s Totem, the present lot, is painted on a city door removed from its utilitarian purpose and adorned with Haring’s signature iconography. For Haring, schooled in the rigors of post-structuralism, these characters were conceived in semiotic terms: parts of a larger linguistic whole, which could be dissembled, disassociated and rearranged according to the artist’s poetic logic.