Pop Shop V is the Keith Haring portfolio where people turn into dolphins and back again. Its four screenprints, made in 1989 in pinks, oranges and turquoises, show a swimmer diving in to join a dolphin, a rider astride one and, in places, the two trading features, with a dolphin on human legs and a person given a tail. The idea is older than the prints. In 1982 Haring’s subway drawings of dolphins and angels merged into a single hybrid of dolphin, mermaid and angel, and during his winters in Bahia, in Brazil, local fishermen who worshipped the sea goddess Yemanjá recognised it as her. The scholar Robert Farris Thompson, who interviewed him, reported that Haring meant the endless circle of humans becoming dolphins becoming humans as a challenge to Darwin, who, Haring told him in 1986, “only goes in one direction”.
The same year he made these prints, Haring painted The Last Rainforest, a picture of the interconnection of all living things prompted by the threat to South America’s rainforests, and Walking in the Rain, which refers to mutations caused by pollution and acid rain. In Pop Shop V, change is pure play. For collectors, it is the portfolio about metamorphosis and the natural world: Haring’s most buoyant line, with a serious idea underneath.
For more information or to buy Keith Haring Pop Shop V 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 Pop Shop V Set (Littmann PP. 148-149)
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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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