Flowers II
Flowers II
Signed Print
Keith Haring
Screenprint, 1990
Signed Print Edition of 100
H 100cm x W 130cm
Critical Review
This signed screen print from 1990 is a limited edition of 100 from Keith Haring’s Flowers series. Completed the year of his tragic death by AIDS in 1990, Flowers II is rendered in bold shapes and fluid lines, showing a set of abstract flowers in yellow, red and blue, set against a pink backdrop. As an example of Haring’s late pop-graffiti style, there is a visceral, painterly quality to this print produced through drip lines and splatter marks.
The Flowers series is an example of Haring’s expression of his own AIDS diagnosis and bodily suffering. Acknowledging the legacy of the Abstract Expressionists, Haring creates gestural strokes and ‘accidental’ drip lines to produce an emotionally charged image that relates to his feelings around his diagnosis. The flower figures that Haring carefully chooses as his subject matter throughout the print series, are deliberately ambiguous in their phallic nature and in their abstractness, this series if markedly different from his explicitly activist works such as Fight AIDS Worldwide (1990).
In this print the flower-like shapes are used as symbols of nature’s ephemerality and the fleeting impermanence of human life. In rendering the subjects to look phallic, Haring makes clear the stigma experienced by homosexual men during the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the way in which their sexuality was weaponised in relation to death and the fragility of life.
