Keith Haring

One of Keith Haring’s most important public works – the Milwaukee mural – is being shown for the first time outside the United States. In April 1983 Keith Haring was invited by Milwaukee’s University Marquette to create a gigantic mural where the new Haggerty Museum was to be built. Keith Haring’s innovative images, filled with great energy, animated the museum’s building site to a degree that would have been inconceivable using more traditional methods.The mural comprises 24 wood panels and is thirty metres long and two and a half metres high. Haring believed that children and dogs were among the most loved and instantly recognisable images; as such at the start of his career he chose these figures as his signature (tag) to make his art easily identifiable next to the many others who, like him, had chosen the street as a place to express individual creativity.Both sides of the mural are painted. On the first side there is, at the top, an uninterrupted sequence of children on all fours and, down below, barking dogs.The other side is denser: the dominant theme is dancing figures inspired by breakdance. Other icons of Haring’s art are placed alongside these dancers: the television set with wings, the dog, and the man with a snake’s head. The centre of the mural depicts a male dancer whose head is a television set with the number 83 drawn on the screen. The right-hand side of this mural displays another of Haring’s symbolic images: a face with three eyes and a poking tongue.The showing of the original mural photographs, taken during the mural’s creation, places Haring’s work for Marquette University in the context of his career as an artist and documents the events that led to the work’s completion. Notwithstanding the frustration Haring felt throughout his life for being ignored by the main American museums, his success today guarantees him a noteworthy place in late twentieth century art.
Monza, Serrone della Villa Reale
1 April – 1 July 2007