“A painting, to a certain extent, is still the illusion of a material. But once you cut that out of the steel and stand it up, it's a real thing, (...) It has this sense of permanence, of reality, that it will exist much longer than I ever will, so it's a kind of immortality.”
—Keith Haring
Manifesting form, rhythm and unrestrained movement, Keith Haring’s iconographic compositions generate their own mode of visual choreography, their repeating motifs and pronounced internal patterns closely aligned to music and the embodied power of dance and performance. Untitled (Two Dancing Figures) was executed in 1987, at a key moment in the artist’s career as he rapidly became one of the most celebrated figures within the New York art world. Offering up a dynamic and energetic display of the iconic forms that propelled the artist to worldwide fame, the present work brings the joyful, colourful movement of his graffitied figures into three dimensions. Haring first began to produce works in aluminium in the mid-1980s at the suggestion of his gallerist Tony Shafrazi: “Put your alphabet in the landscape, in the real world”i. He would debut these sculptures at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1985, continuing from that point to refine and enhance his sculptural practice. The present work is an elegant example of Haring’s multifaceted, ever-evolving practice, a marker of his broader cultural and aesthetic sensitivity.
“The originality was obvious, and the vocabulary was almost like a dictionary of images. There was no reference to any form of decoration—it wasn’t art that was going to sit on the wall, it was art in movement. What was really important to me—and what I couldn’t put into words at the time—was that there was a really conceptual base behind it. There were no words there, but what was said was incredibly animated.”
—Tony Shafrazi on Keith Haring
Untitled (Two Dancing Figures) consists of two enamel-coated aluminium figures, one yellow and one red, attached to a single base. Both move in step, their left legs lifted, while their arms interlock behind their backs; the result is a sculpture of joy and harmony yet also compositional precision, a core aspect of Keith Haring’s varied practice. The present work is strongly influenced by the urban environment of New York, most notably in its evocation of the movement and freedom of dance. Arriving in the city in 1978, the music and nightclub scene proved influential: “All kinds of new things were starting. In music, it was the punk and New Wave scenes… And there was the club scene – the Mudd Club and Club 57, at St. Mark's Place, in the basement of a Polish church, which became our hangout, a clubhouse, where we could do whatever we wanted"ii. This sensitivity to sensation, time and place informs all of Haring’s works, enlivening form and colour through a bold spontaneity.
Arm in arm, the two brightly lacquered, dancing figures of the present work contain a dynamism reminiscent of Alexander Calder’s mobiles yet propound a profoundly humanist message. In this sense, they realise Haring’s belief that “the contemporary artist has a responsibility to continue to celebrate humanity”iii. Haring also made a monumental version of this sculpture measuring almost four metres tall and three metres wide. Intended as a more public sculpture, this variant reflects his roots in the graffiti scene and urban culture of New York. Simultaneously spontaneous yet studied, Untitled (Two Dancing Figures) superbly encapsulates Haring’s ability to distil form and movement to a more essential yet lyrical kind of figuration that remains uniquely his own.
