Name: Flowers IV
Brand: Keith Haring
Rating: 4.9 (172 reviews)

Meaning & Analysis

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, Flowers IV shows an animated scene of organic figures resembling plants, depicted in saturated colours of red, blue, green, yellow and pink. Haring creates a sense of pattern across the image with his use of gestural lines, dots and concentric circles amidst a multitude of forms.

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Acknowledging the legacy of figures like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning from the Abstract Expressionist movement, Haring produces a loosely rendered image and intentionally leaves drip lines and splatter marks across the print. In creating this expressionist image through the medium of screen printing, Haring not only subverts the ideals upheld by the Abstract Expressionists surrounding originality but creates an image that conveys a sense of urgency in its rapid execution and duplication.

Haring’s plant forms in the Flowers series are noticeably phallic as a means to point to the fleeting nature and precariousness of life for homosexual men during the 1980s HIV/AIDS epidemic. In 1990 when this series was completed, Haring knew that he was dying of AIDS and his use of rapid gestural marks makes clear the way in which he was working against time.