Icons is a portfolio of five silkscreen prints from 1990, each showing a single motif from Keith Haring’s visual alphabet: the Radiant Baby, the Barking Dog, the Angel, the Flying Devil and the Three-Eyed Monster. Haring told Rolling Stone that the images first appeared in drawings he made before he took them into the subway: “I was thinking about these images as symbols, as a vocabulary of things.” A figure crawling on all fours became the baby, and an animal figure became the dog. Brad Gooch, author of Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring, says Haring was “very aware of creating a personal language and alphabet to work from”.
By 1990 these motifs had spread far beyond his own work, copied and reproduced around the world, and Icons takes each out of its crowded scenes and presents it alone on a flat, saturated ground, with embossed outlines. Each carries more than its cartoon rendering suggests. The dog on its blood-red ground appears ominous, its jaw unnaturally long, and the angel and devil stand for life and death in a body of work that also deals with apartheid and AIDS. The portfolio was published in 1990 by Tony Shafrazi Editions, the year Haring died, and it works as a summary of his career in its most condensed form. For collectors, Icons is a direct way into Haring’s vocabulary: five characters, each with its own history, shown on their own.
For more information or to buy Keith Haring Icons 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 Icons Portfolio (Littmann PP. 170-171)
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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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