Keith Haring

Pace Prints is pleased to announce Keith Haring: Black, White, and Red All Over, an exhibition of prints and editions by the Pop Art icon, on view from November 22–December 21, 2024 at 536 West 22nd Street. An opening reception will be held at the gallery on Thursday, November 21 from 6-8pm. 

Taking its name from the well-known newspaper riddle, Keith Haring: Black, White, and Red All Over gathers works from 1985 to 1989 and makes reference to the artist’s unflinching artistic engagement with the pressing socio-political concerns of the time. Imagery in dialogue with the artist’s activism appears throughout the exhibition, addressing themes central to his work during this period. 

Many of the artist’s most recognizable motifs are present: elastic dancing figures, the radiant baby, barking dogs, among other essential symbols and characters from his extraordinary visual vocabulary. These prints exemplify his signature graphic style in a palate of black, white, and red, showcasing Haring’s print oeuvre at its most direct and compelling, pulsing with energy and life. 

Known for his affinity towards reproducible mediums, Haring’s work is represented in a breadth of printmaking techniques, including lithography, aquatint, woodcut, and silkscreen. Rare large-scale prints like Retrospect (1989) and Untitled (1986) harness Haring’s narrative power in engrossing black and white compositions, imbuing the many fantastical figures with an approachable comic book sensibility that is undercut by their radically subversive subject matter. 

The Anti-Apartheid triptych Untitled 1-3 (1985) features iconic imagery from the artist’s Free South Africa series, which he widely distributed as protest posters in New York City in 1986. Two unique iterations of the artist’s Totem series will also be on view, presented as both a woodcut on three sheets and a wall relief cast in concrete. These two works, alongside Stones (1-5) (1989), show the ways in which Haring’s Pop iconography was influenced by Aztec, Mayan, North African and Indigenous imagery, developing into his signature style. 

Also at Pace Prints, in keeping with the spirit of the artist’s iconic retail space, The Pop Shop, which opened in 1986 and sought to keep Haring’s artwork accessible to all, specially designed merchandise and apparel will be available for purchase at the gallery throughout the course of the exhibition.

 Shop the Pop Shop at Pace Prints