At New York’s Martos Gallery, Surface to Air celebrates the iconoclast’s ability to transform every surface and reveal 1980s America’s bleeding heart.
Keith Haring wasn’t hung up on the details. While many artists labor over a work, pondering every brushstroke, line, and shadow, Haring purged the art within him with an explosive, immediate effect. He worked quickly and unapologetically, with an unabashed freedom and liberated artistic expression. Haring’s art adorns the walls of famed museums, even the bodies of living icons like Grace Jones, but his first and greatest canvas was New York—namely, the subways. Unoccupied with overzealous detail, this stemmed from his roots as an underground graffiti artist, a place of origin he cherished and never strayed far from. When there’s a good chance you’ll be scared off by police, MTA workers, or other opposing authoritarian forces, an artist learns to act fast and convey their message starkly and precisely.
Curator and critic Bob Nickas noted, “Haring’s speed and dexterity, energy and fluidity, allowed images to appear near-instantaneously, out of thin air. His was a form of automatic writing in an immediately recognizable iconographic language.” The simplicity of Haring’s form belies a profound observational depth: he tackled personal and collective pain, anger, and disillusionment against a backdrop of societal malaise and upheavals like the HIV/AIDS pandemic, Apartheid, and nuclear proliferation. With Surface to Air, Martos Gallery presents an overview of Haring’s striking, political oeuvre with over thirty important works from 1980 to 1989, some familiar and others displayed publicly for the first time.
His work is versatile, never relying on one medium: “Keith Haring never met a surface he couldn’t transform,” Nickas boldly, but not inaccurately, proclaims. “The space between his hand and whatever it came into contact with was alive to his eye, generating an animate visual line, a line of thought made visible.” It utilizes a range of tangible media: marker on plastic, spray enamel on sheet metal, sumi ink on rice paper, and even white paint on a black leather jacket. The art envelops visitors in a dizzying array of colors and textures. Whimsy plays against morbidity. Morose blacks and whites refract bright neon hues. You feel transported as if standing before one of Haring’s then-ubiquitous graffiti works in a grimy yet lively subway station in 1980s Manhattan. Surrounded by the art in this way, you are living in it.
Playfulness and fun can be deceptive. Beneath Haring’s amusing characters and color palette, there is a palpable frustration and sense of impending doom. It is an arsenic pill in candy coating, a truth bomb in a fantasy world. In an untitled chalk-on-paper piece from 1984, Haring depicts a skeletal figure against an ominous black background, a flurry of falling bodies fanning around it like snowflakes. It holds sway over these dollar-sign-embossed figures, who raise their arms pleadingly. Placed in its eye sockets are clocks nearing midnight. Devoid of title or explanation, the piece suggests many interpretations: the inevitability of death, a looming specter over small mortals, or human beings reduced to dollar signs in a capitalist society. Perhaps the piece comments on the Reagan administration’s callous mishandling of the growing AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
In most cases, a work of art is created by imprinting on a medium, but with Haring, the synergy of his lines is often achieved through the painstaking process of erasure. Nickas muses that “[an] idea of fluid movement, the dance of bold lines, whether angular or sinuous, and the choreography of a composition, is central to Haring’s work, consistent from the very beginning.” In a 1988 acrylic-on-paper piece, the artist renders a large, horned sperm cell bursting from an egg; the egg wraps a male figure in a vise-like, umbilical cord embrace. It may not be apparent upon a cursory look, but the white acrylic lines that make up the egg, the monstrous creature, and the human prey are all connected. You can see where he removed the obstructing lines to create this interwoven maze, with a faint shadow remaining. The beastly sperm is likely the HIV wreaking havoc on Haring’s fellow queer people. At the same time, the unbroken lines may represent the strength and interconnectedness of this maligned but still fighting community.
Some of Haring’s works are merely cheeky, poking fun at the New York art world. In Andy Mouse, 1985, Haring caricatures his colleague Andy Warhol, crossing his iconic visage with Mickey Mouse. Warhol’s bubblegum-pink body dances outside its black-lined frame, contrasting with a lime green landscape of dollar signs. Warhol and Disney’s Mouse may seem a farcical combination, but both are easily recognizable figures of American iconography. For someone so deeply enmeshed in the underground, Warhol is inextricably mainstream. Both figures represent millions of dollars in the art and entertainment worlds. With this piece, like his grave political statements, Haring captures the American zeitgeist with the practiced ease of a true graffiti artist.
Surface to Air is on display at Martos Gallery between May 6 and July 25, 2025.Homepage banner image: Keith Haring–Untitled, 1984 Chalk on paper 80 x 40 in203.2 x 101.6 cm (KH_144), homepage article image: Keith HaringAndy Mouse, 1985 Acrylic on canvas48 1/8 x 48 1/8 in122.2 x 122.2 cm (KH_289), inside image: Keith Haring–Untitled, 1988 Acrylic on canvas.May 7, 1988144 x 216 in365.8 x 548.6 cm (KH_291). All images copyright the Keith Haring Foundation.
