Three Eyed Monster
Three Eyed Monster
Signed Print
Keith Haring
53 x 64cm, Edition of 250, Screenprint, 1990
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Meaning & Analysis
This signed screen print from 1990 is a limited edition of 250 from Keith Haring’s Icons series. Establishing a sinister presence within the series, Three Eyed Monster shows an eager and grinning face with three large eyes looking to the side.It is rendered in flat, saturated colours and thick outlines. Haring’s choice of colour and subject gives this print a garish and jarring quality that emphasises both the playful and grotesque in his work.
The Icons series works to bring together some of Haring’s most iconic symbols and the Three Eyed Monster is one that occurs repeatedly throughout his work. Used as a symbol for greed by Haring, this image uses light-hearted imagery and a cartoonish visual language to critique the proliferation of capitalism in 1980s New York. Haring used his art to oppose the negative effects of capitalism and mass consumerism, undoubtedly inspired by the Pop Art movement of the 1960s and his friend, Andy Warhol. As evidenced by his famous Pop Shop, Haring conflated high art with commercialism and so claimed to mirror the capitalist world that he lived in. This print shows Haring’s use of flat, artificial colours that mimic the mass-produced nature of the world he was critiquing.
Three Eyed Monster is uncompromising in its positive, comic tone. However, upon closer examination Haring’s subject carries menacing connotations about greed and hellishness. Adopting a system of expression inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphics, Haring’s syntax of signs create a universal language and a true public art charged with moral weight.
