The Fertility Suite is a portfolio of five screenprints that Keith Haring made in 1983, the year Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York showed his work in Into 84 and published the suite, and three years before the Pop Shop opened. Every figure has a pregnant belly, and the panels of black, yellow and pink, in the neon colours of the New York club scene, give the suite a harsher look than the primary-colour prints that followed. Ancient Egyptian symbols run through it: the ankh, the sign of life, is drawn inside several bodies, and the large central figure recalls the tyet, associated with Isis.
Haring later wrote in his journal that the baby was “the purest and most positive experience of human existence”. In 1983 babies were arriving among his own friends, and Kenny Scharf, whose daughter was born that year, said Haring used the baby as “a symbol of hope”. The dots and dashes that cover some of the figures are read as a reference to the marks the AIDS virus leaves on the body, and the scenes move between celebration and foreboding, with the large spotted figure in two of the prints read as a fertility god or as the disease itself. For collectors, the Fertility Suite is one of Haring’s earliest and most ambitious print projects, the point at which his imagery moved from the subway into the gallery.
For more information or to buy Keith Haring Fertility Suite prints, contact our specialists via info@alexyellop.com. Discover more Keith Haring signed prints for sale or find out more about selling your Keith Haring prints.
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Keith Haring Fertility Portfolio (Littmann PP. 31–33)
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Untitled 1–6 (1982) Portfolio
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Fertility Portfolio
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Montreux Jazz Festival
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Free South Africa
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Ludo
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Three Lithographs
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Andy Mouse
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Bad Boys
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Lucky Strike
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Untitled 1–4 (1987)
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Apocalypse
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Growing
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Pop Shop I
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Pop Shop II
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Pop Shop III
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Pop Shop IV
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Pop Shop V
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Pop Shop VI
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Chocolate Buddha
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Pyramid
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Stones
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The Story of Red and Blue
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The Valley
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Totem
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Untitled Etchings (1989)
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Blueprint Drawings
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Flowers
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Icons
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White Icons
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Single Prints
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