We dropped in on the massive retrospective exhibition of the late, great pioneering artist Keith Haring at the Broad art museum in Los Angeles just before its run ended last week.
The show amounts to one of the largest, most comprehensive collections of Haring’s art work ever. Titled “Keith Haring: Art is for Everybody,” the exhibition has been a blockbuster for the landmark downtown L.A. museum.
On the afternoon we visited, the Broad was packed. The show has Haring’s most famous and iconic paintings, mostly on tarp, as well as archival materials, collaborations and sculptural objects, and posters.
It covers the artist’s career from his early days of creating illicit graffiti art in the New York City subway system to his rise into a pop-art superstar doing epic downtown murals and public artworks. It’s filled with work from the 1980s, Haring’s most prolific and fertile period. The show is excellently curated and absolutely first-rate.
There’s a large swath of paintings and posters from this era inspired by Haring’s deeply personal activist streak that addressed urgent social issues of the ’80s such as apartheid in South Africa and the AIDS crisis. Haring’s untimely death in 1990 at his artistic peak was a result of AIDS.
It is Haring’s massive paintings, filled with instantly recognizable thick-line drawings of dogs, babies, anonymous humans and symbols, that are the stars of the exhibition. Part of Haring’s appeal is that his art communicates ideas in a simplified, accessible, easily understood visual vernacular, while pulling the threads on weighty themes — death, disease, discrimination, sexuality, nuclear war. And it does so with a primal aesthetic grammar that is uniquely Haring’s own.
Of course, we snapped heaps of pix. See below. Enjoy!
GLOBAL GRAPHICA 