Keith Haring — ICONS, 1990
Complete portfolio of five silkscreens with embossing on Arches Cover paper
21 × 25 in. (53.3 × 63.5 cm), each
Edition of 250, plus 25 artist’s proofs, 25 hors commerce proofs and 8 printer’s proofs
Published by Tony Shafrazi Editions, New York
Printed by Studio Heinrici, Ltd., New York
Numbered and accompanied by certification from the Keith Haring Estate
Created in 1990, the final year of Keith Haring’s life, ICONS brings together five of the images that had come to define his extraordinary visual language. The Radiant Baby, Barking Dog, Winged Figure, Dancing Figure and Three-Eyed Face are deceptively simple forms, yet each carries meanings that Haring developed and revisited throughout his career.
The Radiant Baby, among Haring’s earliest and most enduring symbols, embodies innocence, possibility and the primal energy of life. The Barking Dog can be playful or threatening, becoming variously a symbol of authority, aggression and the power of an individual voice. Haring’s Winged Figure suggests transcendence and liberation, while the exuberant Dancing Figure celebrates movement, community and the sheer physical joy that permeates so much of his work. The wonderfully irreverent Three-Eyed Face reflects Haring’s fascination with heightened perception and the transformation of ordinary figures into something strange, humorous and immediately memorable.
Together, these five images offer something approaching a vocabulary of Haring’s art. His genius was the ability to create symbols that could be understood almost instantaneously while remaining open to multiple interpretations. Borrowing the immediacy of graffiti, cartoons and ancient pictographs, Haring developed a language capable of addressing birth and death, sexuality and spirituality, authority and resistance, fear and joy—all without losing its remarkable accessibility.
ICONS also occupies a poignant place within Haring’s oeuvre. Diagnosed with AIDS in 1988, Haring spent the final years of his life working with extraordinary urgency while devoting increasing attention to activism and the Keith Haring Foundation. He died on February 16, 1990, at only 31 years old. The portfolio was published that same year by Tony Shafrazi Editions, connecting it directly to the gallerist who had given Haring his landmark New York gallery debut in 1982.
Unlike many of Haring’s lifetime prints, the ICONS portfolio was issued with certification from the Keith Haring Estate rather than the artist’s handwritten signature. Proper examples bear the edition information and Estate certification associated with Julia Gruen, Executor of the Keith Haring Estate.
Complete portfolios are particularly desirable today. Over the decades, many ICONS sets have been separated as collectors sought individual examples of Haring’s most recognizable imagery. An intact set preserves the relationship among all five images and allows them to be experienced as Haring intended: not simply as individual pictures, but as a remarkably concise summation of an artistic language that has become universal.
