Private Collection, New York

Martos Gallery, New York

Private Collection, Los Angeles

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Keith Haring: Surface to Air, Martos Gallery, New York, NY, 6 May - 25 July 2025

The Keith Haring Show, the Fondazione Triennale di Milan, 27 September 2005 - 29 January 2006

Keith Haring was born on May 4, 1958 in Reading, Pennsylvania and died at the age of thirty-one of AIDS-related illness in New York City in 1990. Since his death, his work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions around the world, most recently at the Albertina Museum, Vienna. From 2013 through 2015, Haring was the subject of an international touring exhibition, “Keith Haring: The Political Line,” which traveled to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the de Young Museum, San Francisco; and the Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich.

In 1994, the Castello di Rivoli hosted a major solo exhibition of Haring’s work, and in 1997, the Whitney Museum of American Art staged a retrospective of Haring’s work that traveled internationally. In 2012, “Keith Haring: 1978-1982”, co-organized in 2010 by the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati and the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, traveled to the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Haring’s work is in major private and public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; The Bass Museum, Miami; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. From June to November of 2019, the Tate Liverpool opened the artist’s first major solo exhibition in the United Kingdom that traveled to BOZAR Brussels in 2020.

By 1984, Keith Haring was no longer just the anonymous “Chalkman” sketching hurriedly beneath the streets of New York. His figures had become instantly recognizable and his exhibitions were attracting international attention. Yet, even as his star ascended, Haring continued to descend into the city’s subway stations, searching for the blank sheets of black paper that covered expired advertisements. It was there, among the commuters and constant movement of the underground, that he believed his work was most alive. “I have been drawing in the subway for three years now,” he reflected in 1982, “and although my career aboveground has skyrocketed, the subway is still my favorite place to draw.” True to that conviction, Haring continued producing subway drawings through the mid-1980s, long after international recognition had made the underground an unlikely place to find one of the art world’s fastest-rising stars.

His 1984 Untitled captures the ambition of that project. A monumental skeleton, its skull punctuated by clocks in place of eyes, dominates the composition. Across its body, Haring's signature anonymous, genderless figures tumble over the skeletal form. Drawn in his unmistakable white chalk against the matte black paper of the Subway Drawings, the scene unfolds with remarkable clarity. “The whole beauty of the drawings is that they were so simple,” Haring explained. “They told a story that you could see from a moving train and you could get it.” Yet beneath that apparent simplicity, his economical lines become an allegory of time, capitalism, and mortality.

The Subway Drawings embodied Haring's conviction that art should belong to everyone. He sought “a more holistic and basic idea of wanting to incorporate [art] into every part of life, less as an egotistical exercise and more natural somehow. I don't know how to exactly explain it. Taking it off the pedestal. I'm giving it back to the people, I guess.” For Haring, the subway was not simply a convenient place to draw but the ideal setting for an art form intended to meet people during the course of their everyday lives.

That vision emerged from an ordinary observation. In 1980, Haring noticed that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority temporarily covered expired advertisements with blank sheets of black paper before replacing them with new campaigns. “I remember noticing a panel in the Times Square station and immediately going aboveground and buying chalk,” he recalled. “After the first drawing things just fell into place. I began drawing on the subways as a hobby on my way to work. I had to ride the subways often and would do a drawing while waiting for a train.” What began as a spontaneous response to an overlooked surface quickly evolved into one of the defining bodies of work of his career.

For the next five years, Haring transformed these fleeting surfaces into one of the most remarkable public art projects of the twentieth century. Working quickly — often producing thirty or forty drawings in a single session — he embraced the knowledge that each image would eventually disappear beneath another advertisement or be cut away by admirers. Their impermanence became part of their desire. The subway was never just a backdrop. It was a laboratory for communication, where art could interrupt routine, provoke reflection, and reach an audience beyond the walls of a museum. More than forty years later, the drawings retain that extraordinary ability: instantly legible, yet impossible to fully exhaust.