1958 – 1990
Keith Haring (1958–1990) believed art belonged to everyone. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania and raised in Kutztown, he arrived in New York City in 1978 to study at the School of Visual Arts, stepping into a downtown scene where graffiti, performance, music and painting were dissolving into one another.
It was in the subway that Haring found his stage. Between 1980 and 1985 he drew in white chalk on the black paper covering unused advertising panels — quick, confident figures made in front of passing commuters, with no preparatory sketches and no erasing. The radiant baby, the barking dog and the dancing man became a vocabulary New Yorkers learned to read on their way to work.
Solo exhibitions with Tony Shafrazi, the Whitney Biennial, Documenta and the São Paulo Bienal, and public murals on four continents made Haring one of the defining artists of the 1980s. In 1986 he opened the Pop Shop in SoHo so his work could reach far beyond collectors — a radical idea that still shapes how artists connect with the public today.
He turned his imagery toward the urgent questions of his time: anti-apartheid campaigns, literacy and, above all, AIDS awareness. He founded the Keith Haring Foundation in 1989 and died in New York on 16 February 1990, aged thirty-one, leaving a body of work whose optimism and moral clarity have only grown louder with time.
Kings Gallery presents a curated selection of works by Keith Haring — original drawings on paper, signed objects and hand-worked editions that show the immediacy at the heart of his practice. Each piece is offered with the gallery’s guidance on condition and provenance, and our team is glad to arrange viewings and organise secure worldwide shipping from Jerusalem.
