From 21 February to 18 June 2017, Milan celebrates the genius of Keith Haring (1958-1990) with a major exhibition at Palazzo Reale.
The review, for the first time, renders the profound meaning and complexity of his research, highlighting its relationship with the history of art. Within the exhibition itinerary, Haring's works are placed in dialogue with his sources of inspiration, from classical archeology to pre-Columbian arts, to the archetypal figures of religions, to the masks of the Pacific and to the creations of Native Americans, up to reach the masters of the twentieth century, such as Pollock, Dubuffet, Klee.
The Keith Haring Exhibition. About Art, curated by Gianni Mercurio, promoted and produced by the Municipality of Milan-Culture, Palazzo Reale, Giunti Arte exhibitions, museums and 24 ORE Cultura – Gruppo 24 ORE, with the scientific collaboration of Madeinart, with the precious contribution of the Keith Haring Foundation, presents 110 works, many of monumental dimensions, some of which are unpublished or never exhibited in Italy.
The exhibition revolves around a new critical assumption: the retrospective reading of Haring's work is not correct if it is not also seen in the light of the history of the arts which he understood and placed at the center of his work, assimilating it to the point of explicitly integrating it into his paintings and thus constructing the most significant part of his aesthetic research.
The works of the American artist join those of authors from different eras, which Haring was inspired by and which he has reinterpreted with his unique and unmistakable style, in a narrative synthesis of archetypes of the classical tradition, of tribal and ethnographic art, of gothic imagery or cartoonism, of languages of his century and excursions into the future with the use of the computer in some of his latest experiments. Among these, there are those made by Jackson Pollock, Jean Dubuffet, Paul Klee for the twentieth century, but also the casts of Trajan's Column, the masks of Pacific cultures, the paintings of the Italian Renaissance and others.
Keith Haring was one of the most important authors of the second half of the twentieth century; his art is perceived as the expression of a counterculture socially and politically committed to themes specific to him and to our time: drugs, racism, AIDS, nuclear threat, youth alienation, discrimination against minorities, arrogance of power. Haring participated in a collective feeling becoming the global artist-activist icon.
However, his project, made evident in this exhibition, was to recompose the languages of art into a single personal, symbolic imagery, which was at the same time universal, to rediscover art as a testimony of an inner truth which places at its the center is man and his social and individual condition. It is in this drawing that Haring's true greatness lies; from here his celebrated commitment as an artist-activist starts and develops and his strong singularity with respect to his contemporaries is affirmed.
The exhibition will be ordered in an exciting setting and at the same time full of references to the context in which Haring's short and explosive life allowed him to express himself as one of the most recognized personalities of post-war American art.
The catalogue, published by GAmm Giunti/24 ORE Cultura, will include, in addition to a vast illustrated biography and all the works on display, essays by the curator, Gianni Mercurio, Demetrio Paparoni, Marina Mattei and Giuseppe Di Giacomo.
KEITH HARING. ABOUT ART
Milan, Royal Palace
February 21 - June 18, 2017
