Pop Shop I (A) (Littmann P. 82) by Keith Haring shows two figures against a teal ground, a sunburst of short black dashes radiating overhead. The yellow figure on the left drapes an arm across the red figure's shoulder and up towards its head, the two bodies angled together rather than facing outward, purple dotted mounds anchoring each pair of feet at the base of the sheet.

It's a motif Haring returned to often enough to count among his private vocabulary — two figures locked together standing in for friendship, partnership or community without specifying which, since the point was never to illustrate a particular relationship but to give a general one a shape simple enough to recognise instantly. As the opening plate in the Pop Shop I portfolio, it sets a tone the other three plates carry through in different registers: connection read at a glance, no caption required, running as the throughline across the whole set.

Produced in 1987 in an edition of 200 plus 30 artist's proofs and 10 hors commerce, Pop Shop I (A) belongs to the portfolio that launched Haring's six-part Pop Shop series, the project that grew out of the shop he opened on Lafayette Street the year before. As the founding set, it remains one of the most actively traded of the six on the secondary market — the complete four-print portfolio last achieved $177,800 at Sotheby's — a standing that reflects both its place at the start of the series and the warmth of the imagery itself.

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