Keith Haring Untitled, 1983 (detail)

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Two pieces in our upcoming 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale exemplify Keith Haring's genius and dexterity as an artist. The early 1980s are the most sought-after years of Keith Haring's tragically short and intense career. Starting at an early age when his father made him sketches of characters from comic strips through his graffiti days in the New York subway, Haring invented his own alphabet of contemporary artistic language.

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Under the influence of Andy Warhol and contemporary to Jean-Michel Basquiat, Haring believed that art was a product of the individual and the ultimate expression of individuality. He chose the public realm for his art out of curiosity and an embrace of his temperament as well as his generosity. Enjoying success at a very young age, his philosophy was an idea of universal art strongly influenced by the aesthetics of decoration and eighties post-modernism.

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The early 1980s were a heady time in New York, and particularly within the specific artistic milieu with which Haring ran. By 1983, Haring had his first exhibition, his "coming out" of sorts within the New York art world, at Tony Shafrazi Gallery the year prior, and his exhibition in February of 1983 at Fun Gallery would firmly establish his place among the pantheon of the scene. Wrote Timothy Greenfield-Sanders in "An Afternoon with Keith" from 2005, "Fun Gallery was the epicenter of this new scene. Opening nights spilled into the streets, as the graffiti kids tried to figure out how their art could move from the walls of the city to the walls of the gallery. From the beginning, Keith Haring was one to watch. He was respected below ground and up above." Completely covering the walls, the two installed an exhibition of a variety of material and objects.

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These two particular works, executed on calf hides, were installed – one directly on the wall, and the other on the door to Fun Gallery's office. Employing his trademark style and graphic line, Haring adorned and imbued these hides with his frenetic energy and iconography. Taking his almost tribal line directly to this very ancient support of hide, Haring brought the ancient, the mythic and the Dionysian into the mania of 1980s New York.

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The graffiti kids [of the 1980s] tried to figure out how their art could move from the walls of the city to the walls of the gallery.
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Keith Haring Untitled, 1983

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Haring's art has always been so powerful because it has an ability to embody so many meanings and to be relevant for so many people. Grounded in art historical tradition from Legér and Dubuffet to Egyptian and aboriginal hieroglyphs and petroglyphs, Haring's art also encapsulated the immediacy and directness of the man himself and the times in which he came of age.

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Keith Haring Untitled, 1983

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One need not have any artistic schooling to realize that Haring exemplified that singularly unifying trait of all artists, to share something with the rest of humanity.

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Melding high and low, destroying barriers between public and private, the elite strata of the art world and the grittiness of his East Village locale, Haring and works such as these two Untitled paintings serve now as particular talismans from an age gone by, but forever relevant.

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Detail of Robert Rauschenberg Deepend (Scenario), 2006

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From our upcoming Day Sale, Robert Rauschenberg's Deepend (Scenario) originally premiered at PaceWildenstein in the 2006 exhibition Robert Rauschenberg: Scenarios and the Ancient Incident. His Scenarios cull imagery from the American environment and have been aptly described as "massive 'super' multilayered paintings that tell stories and cry out about American life; they are panoramas that have an epic quality," wrote Oscar Hijuelos for New York's Pace Gallery in 2005.

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Rauschenberg's artistic interest spans across every type of medium, working in and conjoining photography, printmaking, papermaking and performance. Most revealingly of his later interest in the flatness of composition, Rauschenberg spent an important period in his early career as a set designer for the groundbreaking choreographers Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor. As a print maker, Rauschenberg was the first artist to document the technique of transfer printmaking in 1958, when he recognized that when newspaper was soaked in solvent, the image would transfer onto collages and painting.

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FRONT STREET STUDIO, 1958. Rauschenberg working on a solvent transfer drawing in his Front Street studio, New York, 1958, Photo by Jasper Johns Photo © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

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This early pioneering technique led Rauschenberg in 1992 to utilize his Iris printer to make digital high-resolution prints of his photographs, and, by the use of dye transfer process, he produced large scale works on paper — or, as seen in this particular wrok, Rauschenberg's Scenarios appear painterly in technique, like a collage of imagery that is both fluid and discrete. Collage for the artist was an early interest of his gleaned from the cubist experiments of Braque and Picasso and the assemblages of the Dadaists. In 2005, Carol Vogel for The New York Times described Rauschenberg's studio work tables "as covered with piles of enlarged photographs — material for his 'Scenarios,' a series of 7-by-10-foot canvases incorporating images of everything from street signs to windswept dunes." Standing up "until my legs give out" is how the artist described his process of meticulously arranging the photographs.

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Few artists of Rauschenberg's era so unabashedly strove for beauty, even majesty.
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Robert Rauschenberg Deepend (Scenario), 2006

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Deepend (Scenario), 2006 presents us with a myriad of clashing images, wheels on a highway truck and airplane, an idle, locked-up bicycle, water rushing, a boat moored to a dock, a neoclassical sculpture of marble nymphs and the fawning palm tree branches with acai berries. Each image, strategically placed, emphasizes a precise movement or condition of arrested movement: wheels spinning, water flowing, Palm leaves wavering in the wind. They are visually unified not only by their common shapes and intimations of motion but also by the way each image has been processed and assembled to create a softly glowing composition; this is suggested but by the illusion of yellow sunlight that uniformly bathes each image within the larger whole.

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The power of these collaged images arises from the seemingly haphazard play of shapes and motifs that are ultimately made unified by an underlying, subtle affinity of forms and connotations. As art critic Dan Chiasson recently noted in The New York Times, "In a finished Rauschenberg, you see a goat, a tire, a tennis ball, but more than that, you see the insights that brought them together. Each component keeps its integrity within a composition in which everything contributes to a profound effect of overall beauty.

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Indeed, few artists of his era so unabashedly strove for beauty, even majesty: The logic of his work, beginning with cast-offs and flotsam demanded it.It was the dare he put to himself in everything he made."

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235

Wangechi Mutu

I Have Peg Leg Nightmares

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Wangechi Mutu