Flowers 3 (Littmann P. 166) by Keith Haring reimagines botanical imagery through looping contours, saturated colour and rhythmic repetition, set against an intense yellow ground.

A large mint-green vessel-like form occupies the centre of the work, its rounded structure enclosing a yellow interior punctuated by a red spiral motif. Alongside it, stacked floral and segmented forms rise vertically in vivid reds, blues and purples, creating a structure that feels simultaneously organic and architectural.

The small perforations and dotted openings scattered through the composition are among the most direct instances of a device Haring returned to across the Flowers prints: circular voids used to signal otherness, concealment and, in the context of a series made as he was dying of AIDS-related illness, the specific stigma attached to gay men’s bodies during the epidemic. Read against that context, the vessel at the centre of Flowers 3 sits closer to a body under examination than a still-life subject.

The silkscreen process allows the saturated colours to operate with exceptional intensity against the uninterrupted yellow background, and small drips visible within the colour fields preserve a sense of physical gesture rather than mechanical precision – the same visceral, unfinished-looking mark-making that runs through the whole series and that has drawn comparisons to Pollock and de Kooning’s handling of paint.

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