From 21 February to 18 June 2017, Milan celebrates the genius of Keith Haring (1958-1990) with an impressive exhibition at Palazzo Reale.
Keith Haring. About Art, curated by Gianni Mercurio, promoted and produced by the Cultural Department of the Municipality of Milan, Palazzo Reale, Giunti Arte Mostre Musei and 24 ORE Cultura – 24 ORE Group, with the scientific support of Madeinart, and with the invaluable contribution of the Keith Haring Foundation, showcases 110 works, many of which of huge proportions, some never exhibited before or never been shown in Italy, coming from US, European and Asian public and private collections.
The event revolves around a new critical approach: Haring’s work is grasped better if one considers it from an art history perspective, which he understood and placed at the core of his work, assimilating it and explicitly integrating it into his paintings, becoming the key element in his aesthetic research.
Haring’s works are placed close to those by artists from different periods, who inspired him and whom he reinterpreted in his signature style, creating a synthetic narrative of archetypes from the classical tradition, of tribal and ethnographic art, Gothic imagery and the cartoonist tradition, the languages of his own century, as well as computer-aided excursions into the future in some of his last experiments. The exhibition features 20th century works by Jackson Pollock, Jean Dubuffet and Paul Klee, and plaster casts of Trajan’s Column, Pacific masks, Italian Renaissance paintings and so forth.
Keith Haring was one of the most remarkable artists of the second half of the 20th century. His art is considered the expression of a socially and politically committed counterculture, dealing with issues of his and our age: drugs, racism, Aids, the nuclear threat, youth alienation, minority discrimination and the arrogance of power. Haring took part in a collective experience and became the icon of the global artist-activist.
However, his project, as the exhibition explains, was to bring the languages of art together in a single, personal, symbolic imagery that was also universal, to rediscover art as the testimony of an inner truth, whose focus is Man and his social and individual condition. Haring’s true greatness lies in this very project, this is where his celebrated commitment as an artist-activist and unique distinctiveness from his contemporaries sprang and developed.
The layout of the exhibition is truly captivating and abounds with references to the context in which Haring’s short explosive life enabled him to express himself as one of the most acknowledged personalities of postwar American art.
The catalogue, published by GAmm Giunti/24 ORE Cultura, includes a rich illustrated biography, as well as reproductions of all the works on display, in addition to texts by the curator Gianni Mercurio, and by Demetrio Paparoni, Marina Mattei and Giuseppe Di Giacomo.