Name: Fertility 1
Brand: Keith Haring
Rating: 5 (236 reviews)

Track auction value trend

The value of Keith Haring's Fertility 1 (signed) is estimated to be worth between £40,000 and £60,000. This screenprint has shown consistent value growth, with an average annual growth rate of 6%. There have been 6 sales at auction in the last 12 months. Over the past five years, the hammer price has ranged from £30,000 in September 2020 to £50,497 in July 2022. The average return to the seller over the last five years has been £31,917. This work is part of a limited edition of 100.

Meaning & Analysis

This signed screen print from 1983 is a limited edition of 100 from Keith Haring’s Fertility Suite series. Utilising Haring’s trademark bold visual language, Fertility 1 uses bold colours and simplified form to depict pregnant women dancing in energetic bodily motions that recall African fertility dances. Haring shows his trademark radiant baby symbol as the print’s centrepiece to reflect this idea of celebrating fertility and life.

Haring was fascinated with babies and pregnant women and used these motifs throughout his work to represent “the purest and most positive experience of human existence” and as a symbol of hope for the future. Through the use of jarring neon colours and agitated moving figures, Haring injects tension and anxiety to this otherwise positive subject matter. Furthermore, Haring uses dotted lines and circles in this series to allude to the lesions of people with HIV/AIDS and the threat this poses to pregnant women.

Haring’s Fertility Suite series is exemplary of the way in which he used a positive visual language to speak out against hard hitting subjects such as racism, homophobia, the apartheid in South Africa and HIV/AIDS. Fertility 1 alludes to the high prevalence of HIV infection among pregnant women in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s, notably the transmission of the virus from mother to child.