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Curator Dieter Buchhart and Brant Foundation’s Allison Brant Want to Reintroduce You to Keith Haring

“His pictograms are open enough to invite broad identification, but precise enough to carry critiques of racism, authoritarianism, nuclear threat, homophobia, consumerism, drug dependency and later the devastation of AIDS. He did not separate ethics from aesthetics.”

Last week, the Brant Foundation opened “Keith Haring,” an exhibition in their East Village townhouse that examines the artist’s early years in New York’s downtown scene. The show gathers works made between 1980 and 1983, an important period in Haring’s life that saw him go from graffiti prankster to gallery darling. We caught up with the show’s co-curator Dr. Dieter Buchhart and Brant Foundation director Allison Brant (daughter of billionaire industrialist and collector Peter Brant) to hear more about this moment-in-time exhibition.

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This exhibition focuses on the early years of Keith Haring’s career, roughly 1980-1983. What made this short period the most compelling lens through which to revisit Haring today?

Dr. Dieter Buchhart: These years contain the moment in which Haring’s entire visual language came into being. Between 1980 and 1983, one can watch him invent, condense, test and sharpen the pictorial vocabulary that later became globally recognizable: the radiant baby, the barking dog, the activated body, the glowing line, the theatrical silhouette, the hieroglyph-like compression of complex meanings into immediate signs. For us, this is the most exciting point of entry because it is the phase in which the work is still radically open, experimental and connected to the city as a living laboratory.

Allison Brant: It is also the period before Haring was fixed into a simplified public image. Today, many people think they already know him, but when you return to the early years, you rediscover how daring, unstable and searching this work really was. The subway drawings, the early tarpaulins, the fluorescent paintings and the first major exhibitions show an artist who was not repeating a formula but building a language in real time. That makes the period feel extraordinarily contemporary again, because it speaks to how images circulate, how symbols are read and how a public visual code can emerge almost overnight.

Haring’s work moved from the subway to the gallery very quickly. This show includes key works from key historical........

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