(Kutztown 1958–1990 New York)
Pyramid Sculpture, 1989, signed, dated (incised) on plate on the inside of the pyramid K. Haring 89, anodized aluminium, one of 2 PP aside the edition of 15 (+6 AP), fabricators: Domberger, Stuttgart and Aluplan GmbH, Korb/ Stuttgart, edited by Schellman Art Production Munich/ New York (stamped on the plate), 144 x 144 x 75 cm

Provenance:
Private Collection, Switzerland
Private Collection, North-Rhine Westphalia – acquired directly from the above in 1991

Literature:
Jörg Schellmann (Ed), Forty are better than one, Edition Schellmann 1969–2009, Munich/ New York 2009, p. 146, no. 16 (colour ill.)

“The drawings just happened, and when things happen, you build on them. Some call it coincidence, others fate. It no longer surprises me that these things happen.” Keith Haring in an interview with Barry Blinderman in 1981
Keith Haring, ed. Germano Celant, p. 31

“The reality of art begins in the eyes of the beholder and gains power through imagination, invention, and confrontation.”
Keith Haring, Art in Transit 1984

At the tender age of 20, Keith Haring quickly joined the up-and-coming East Village art scene in New York in 1978, which also encompassed Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf and Al Diaz. He was able to count Madonna, Grace Jones, Andy Warhol, Jean Tinguely, Claude Picasso and Yves Arman among his supporters, friends and mentors.
Keith Haring began drawing figures and designing various symbols as early as his childhood. He grew up in Pennsylvania, and drew chalk marks everywhere he went, on advertising posters, display boards and at bus stops. New York’s subway stations, with their long, straight walls, were chosen by him to be a “laboratory” for his black and white drawings from 1978 onwards, and he experimented with countless versions of his characteristic linear figures. His figures, either in black and white or in primary colours, are easily recognised: they are hieroglyphics that can be read like the language of an urban tribe. His symbols and archetypal forms, whose shapes stick in the human subconscious, have appeared in thousands of guises all over the world, on the walls of schools, hospitals, on the façades of run-down houses and on towering billboards. Keith Haring usually did not ask for any financial compensation, even once he had become a world-renowned artist and, for example, worked alongside children to paint the façade of the church of St. Antonio on behalf of the city of Pisa. As with the pyramid in this auction, the figures slot together like a mosaic, tightly arranged and intertwined, filling the entire surface of the picture. Initially, Keith Haring depicted numerous rhetorical and religious metaphors, such as the cross, the halo and the hole left by the soul in the human body. From 1981 onwards, fantastic hybrid beings were added to these images with increasing frequency, such as a computer with a head, multi-eyed creatures and figures with enormous sexual organs. Keith Haring’s work created a medieval bestiary for the modern day and made his universal ciphers readable for everyone, thus creating a social and collective being.
The process by which these (often huge) murals were produced is described by Keith Haring’s friends, such as Claude Picasso and the Belgian gallery owner Roger Nellens, as being unusually fascinating and unique. Claude Picasso compares Haring’s working methods to those of his father, Pablo Picasso. Haring worked without any preliminary drawings whatsoever, creating art freehand and purely from his imagination. He drew the black contour lines from above in a single stroke, without assistance (sometimes standing on a ladder). Claude Picasso had Keith Haring paint the door of his son Jasmin’s room in 1987 and wrote of the occasion: “He focused on the task, stood close to the door and painted from top to bottom, went down on his knees, never stepping back once to examine his work. Only after he had painted the entire door area did he take a step back and there it was, a complete, wonderful painting. Well, my father would have gone about it in exactly the same way” (Claude Picasso, in: Keith Haring, Die autorisierte Biographie, by John Gruen, Munich 1991, p. 175).
Keith Haring introduced the rare pyramids to his audience in 1989, just one year before his death in February 1990. On the four sides of the pyramid created by silkscreen prints on anodized aluminium, Keith Haring’s characteristic figures and symbols are depicted as the universal language of ciphers, celebrating life in an ecstatic dance. The opulent figures in gold and blue are arranged within the large pyramid shape to form an overarching, interwoven network against a gold or blue background. Some of the linear figures and symbols are closely related to each other and are directly connected by lines, while others are solitary, organically shaped mosaic pieces, inserted into the lines of the surrounding figures. For Keith Haring, the pyramidal shape symbolises a strong connection to mankind’s myth-laden ancient past, but it also establishes a reference to eternity and imperishability. The unbelievable variety of these closely related figures and symbols is evidence of the highly geometric approach that is characteristic of Keith Haring’s work. The artist uses these pyramids to give his graffiti, originating from New York’s subway system, an elitist stage and brings together almost all the characters from his entire oeuvre in this one work.