Flowers Complete Portfolio (Littmann PP. 165–167) by Keith Haring comprises a set of five silkscreen prints produced in 1990, uniting some of the most fluid and organically structured imagery from Haring’s later body of work.

The portfolio is also a direct homage: Haring conceived it as a tribute to his friend and touchstone Andy Warhol’s own 1970 Flowers portfolio, translating Warhol’s appropriated hibiscus photographs into Haring’s own graffiti-derived vocabulary of line and repetition.

Across the five works, flowers dissolve into looping contours, serpentine stems, radiant symbols and openly phallic forms that shift constantly between abstraction and representation. Made in the final months before Haring’s death from AIDS-related illness, the series has become one of the most closely read bodies of work in his late career: dealers and scholars alike identify the recurring plant forms as a coded meditation on the epidemic, sexuality and mortality, running beneath the surface joy of the colour and line. Thick black contour lines organise the imagery into dense interconnected systems, while saturated reds, yellows, blues, greens and oranges keep the works visually buoyant even as their underlying content darkens across the set.

Silkscreen printing proved particularly suited to this material, allowing the flat areas of saturated colour to maintain extraordinary intensity while preserving the drips and irregularities of Haring’s hand — a departure from the more mechanical precision of his earlier editions, and one that has drawn comparisons to the gestural painting of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. The Flowers Portfolio remains among the most emotionally layered groups of prints Haring produced, combining organic imagery, coded symbolism and graphic immediacy within a body of work made at the very end of his career.

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