Exhibition of the week Keith Haring
Tate Liverpool, Liverpool (0151-702 7400, tate.org.uk). Until 10 November
The work of American artist Keith Haring (b.1958) was ubiquitous in the 1980s, said Adrian Searle in The Guardian. A “gawky skinny kid” with glasses who drew compulsively, Haring was “joyous, riotous, funny and angry”, and his lively, cartoon-like images of dancing babies, barking dogs and bouncing figures could be found everywhere from museums and galleries to MTV and New York subway carriages. They featured on T-shirts and badges, in nightclubs and even on a section of the Berlin Wall. Alas, this purple patch was cut short: Haring died of Aids in 1990, aged only 31. Yet as this new retrospective demonstrates, his brutally brief career produced no end of dazzlingly inventive art. The show “unpacks” Haring’s work from its beginnings to his premature demise, bringing together a wealth of drawings, posters, archival footage and other ephemera to reveal how his seemingly “basic” and “benign” style became ever more complicated, dark and fascinating. The resulting exhibition is truly thrilling.
Haring made his name as a graffiti artist, said Hettie Judah in the I newspaper. Inspired by “both ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural sources” – from ancient Egypt and Roland Barthes to Dr Seuss and Walt Disney – he would often create up to 40 drawings a day, working on the walls of subway stations, on “abandoned wooden panels” and construction-site tarpaulins. The show even features a “mangled” taxi bonnet that Haring covered in “marker-pen hieroglyphics” and – unbelievably – a fullscale recreation of his breakthrough commercial exhibition, for which he transformed a Manhattan art gallery into a hiphop club. It’s riveting. By comparison, however, Haring’s “more conventional” painted works here seem slightly underwhelming, undermined by a “sameyness” that belies how versatile he could be.
Nevertheless, Haring excelled as a “message man”, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. He was a committed activist, regularly addressing subjects including racism, drug crime and – as a gay artist – safe sex and LGBT rights. He designed some unforgettable public-health posters in response to the Aids crisis, and continued to create work on the subject even after his own diagnosis in 1988. These final pictures are “graphic art at its most biting”: one image here depicts “an apocalyptic tornado of violence” erupting from a sick body, while in the “devastating”
Set of Ten Drawings, he personifies the virus as “a vicious mutation” of Mickey Mouse. While its conclusion is tragic, this is “a show of unexpected jubilance and beauty”. Do not miss it.