Keith Haring: Future Primeval

Excerpt from the Introduction: Curating an exhibition of an artist who virtually created around the clock for ten years is an unwieldy task. I decided early on to concentrate on works that have had minimum exposure in publications or exhibitions in the U.S. Haring's curious eschewal of traditional art mediums in favor of discarded or commercial materials such as vinyl, metal shelving, automobile panels and garden statuary has been given great emphasis in the exhibition. More than two dozen subway drawings are presented for the first time in an above-ground context to illuminate their seminal importance in the artist's oeuvre. The earliest work included is a pre-figurative Sumi ink drawing done in 1979, while Haring attended the School of Visual Arts. I chose 1985 as a cutoff date predominantly in order to encompass the full evolution of the subway drawings, executed from 1981 to 1985; and also to examine the earliest works by the artist alluding directly to the death knell of AIDS; to include small-scale examples of the painted steel sculptures that were fabricated in the later 1980s; and to avoid the weighty and often misused term: retrospective. Haring made art until the last days of his brief yet incredibly prolific and benevolent life. I anticipate an eventual exhibition of far greater scale than Future Primeval that will amass major works spanning the compressed decade of his artistic career.