American artist, widely regarded as one of the most recognized names in Graffiti and Pop art.

Trained at the Pittsburgh Center of Arts and the School of Visual Arts, New York, he was a friend of Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Soon after completing school, Haring began experimenting with Graffiti art on the streets of New York.

'Graffiti were the most beautiful things I ever saw,' commented Keith. 'The kids who were doing it were very young and from the streets, but they had this incredible mastery of drawing which totally blew me away. I mean, just the technique of drawing with spray paint is amazing, because it's incredibly difficult to do. And the fluidity of line, and the scale, and always the hard-edged black line that tied the drawings together! It was the line I had been obsessed with since childhood!'

Haring’s first show was held in October 1982 at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in SoHo. The exhibition drew some 4,000 people and showed Haring as prolific and electric, with works on the street styles of breakdancing, rap music and graffiti to the sexual freedom of the period and the greater interchange between races.

His style came to be associated with the artistic traditions of Africa, Asia, Australia, Oceania, and the Americas, with its powerful imagery of social consciousness. Despite his youth and untimely death from AIDS, at the age of 27, Haring was invited to show his work - from 1980 to 1985 - at the Bordeaux Contemporary Art Museum in France and at the Stedelijk Museum in the Netherlands.

Art by Keith Haring can also be found at:

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Allentown Art Museum, Pennsylvania Untitled, 1982

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Quebec

Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia Untitled, 1982.