Name: The Valley Page 3
Brand: Keith Haring
Rating: 5 (233 reviews)

Track auction value trend

The value of Keith Haring’s The Valley Page 3, an etching from 1989, is estimated to be worth between £2,500 and £3,700. This work, signed by the artist, has an auction history of three total sales since its entry to the market in June 2019. Over the past 12 months, the average selling price was £1,800, with an average annual growth rate of 3%. The hammer price over the past five years has ranged from £1,800 in July 2024 to £2,000 in July 2021. The average annual growth rate of this artwork is 3%. The edition size of this piece is limited to 80.

Auction Date

Auction House

Location

Hammer Price

Return to Seller

Buyer Paid

July 2024

Forum Auctions London

United Kingdom

July 2021

Forum Auctions London

United Kingdom

June 2019

Forum Auctions London

United Kingdom

Meaning & Analysis

This signed etching from 1989 is a limited edition of 80 from Keith Haring’s The Valley series. The Valley Page 3 shows an image of an ugly looking arm, delicately holding a device made of fishbones. Despite the frenzied subject matter of the series and energy of the image, Haring maintains a simplicity in line that he is renowned for, depicting this image exclusively in black and white.

The Valley series is one of many by Haring that when considered in full, tells an unusual story as the sequence of images, combined with text, unfold. Comparable to his Apocalypse series (1988) completed one year earlier, Haring’s images are chaotic and are born from a collaboration with the Beat Era poet and novelist William S. Burroughs, whose text-based ‘cut-up’ method formed the basis of Haring’s pictographic style.

Haring’s later works such as The Valley Page 3 have been compared within art historical narratives to the chaotic storytelling of Hieronymus Bosch and the fierce liveliness of his friend and contemporary Jean-Michael Basquiat. This particular series is representative of a stylistic shift exemplified in his Cranbrook Mural (1987) that introduced intentional blotches, drips and themes around death and the end of times.