Next week, an exhibition of Keith Haring‘s artwork from the early 1980s opens at the Brant Foundation in New York’s East Village, the same neighborhood where the Pop and graffiti artist first made a name for himself.
The tight date range was very intentional. Co-curators Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer told ARTnews that they wanted to focus on Haring’s formative years, when he was he was still so connected to New York.
“It is remarkable when you read his diary,” Hofbauer notes, “how much he was on the move. By the mid ’80s he was constantly talking about traveling the world—Tokyo, Paris, Amsterdam. In the early ’80s, he was still formalizing his vocabulary. Around ’85 he added a new vocabulary, related to the ongoing AIDS epidemic.” Haring died from AIDS-related causes in 1990.
Buchhart and Hofbauer are well-versed in this era of art history. They curated “Basquiat X Warhol” at the Brant Foundation in 2024 and Buchhart organized a Basquiat solo show there in 2019. Their Keith Haring show includes nearly 50 artworks, many of which were first exhibited in now-legendary shows at downtown galleries like FUN and Tony Shafrazi, as well as the alternative art space P.S. 122. There are large-scale painted tarps, chalk drawings Haring made in-situ on New York City subways, many dancing figures, and even a painted vase.
Below, Buchhart and Hofbauer discuss some of the most important artworks in “Keith Haring,” on view at the Brant Foundation from Mar. 11-May 31.
