| Keith Haring Drawings 2006May 8, 2006- August 11, 2006
Alona Kagan Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibit, “Keith Haring Drawings”. This exhibition features major historical works, including subway drawings, Sumi ink on vellum drawings and large scale drawings from the early 1980s. Haring's fame escalated with the subway drawings. This was an immediate way for the artist to communicate with everyday people riding the NYC transit system and for the public to experience art outside of the gallery and museum context.
"In 1980, I returned to drawing with a new commitment to purpose and reality. If I was going to draw, there had to be a reason. That reason, I decided, was for people. The only way art lives is through the experience of the observer. The reality of art begins in the eyes of the beholder and gains power through imagination, invention, and confrontation." -- Keith Haring (excerpt from Art in Transit)
Keith Haring on the vellum drawings:
“These drawings were created over a period of a few weeks between December 1980 and January 1981. The original drawings were executed on vellum with Sumi ink because I intended to make blueprint copies of each of the drawings. Periodically I would take my drawings to the local blueprinters, where I had much enjoyment trying to explain the content of these works to the men who operated the blueprint machines. After a few weeks, everyone in the shop was familiar with my drawings. This was also the time I began drawing in the NYC subways.
The drawings were exhibited in a small gallery space at Westbeth Painter’s Space in February 1981. It was my first one-man exhibition in New York City. The exhibition lasted for one week, during which time I sold several blueprint copies of the drawings, but no original drawings. Since then many of the drawings have been sold and I don’t know their whereabouts. However, before I sold any of them I made Photostats of each of the drawings. These prints were made from those stats. They form a perfect time capsule of my beginning in New York City." --Keith Haring, 1990, New York (an excerpt from the catalog, “Keith Haring: Editions on paper 1982-1990”
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