Keith Haring Growing Portfolio For Sale: Facts | Meaning | Market Demand

Growing is the Keith Haring portfolio in which his figures stop dancing alone and start holding each other up: five screenprints made in 1988 and published in New York by Martin Lawrence, in which bodies stack, branch and interlock into towers and grids. Haring said that what he responded to most in the artists who inspired him was the belief that “art could reach all kinds of people”, and commentators read Growing as that belief turned into an image, its figures running together regardless of gender, class or background. The People Ladder that opens the suite, in which a small haloed figure is lifted by the community beneath it, is one of his most recognisable motifs, and commentators connect it with the mural he painted on the Berlin Wall two years earlier.

The suite dates from the year Haring was diagnosed with AIDS, and dealers and critics read its joyful interdependence as an expression of hope. Jeffrey Deitch has said that, because the hand is central to Haring’s process, “his work comes right out of his body”, an idea that Growing makes almost literal in figures built from limbs and circles that grow out of one another. Commentators also read the alien figures in the final plate as stand-ins for outsiders, in keeping with Haring’s lifelong sympathy for the underdog. For collectors, Growing is the portfolio that captures his optimism, with some of the most inviting figures in his printed work.

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