Three Eyed Monster (white)
Three Eyed Monster (white)
Signed Print
Keith Haring
Screenprint, 1990
Signed Print Edition of 60
H 53cm x W 64cm
Critical Review
This signed screen print from 1990 is a limited edition of 60 from Keith Haring’s White Icons series. Featuring one of the artist's most widely known motifs, Three Eyed Monster shows a square, smiling face with three large eyes looking avidly to the right, rendered without colour as an embossing on white paper. When compared to Haring’s garish print of the same motif, Three Eyed Monster from his Icons series, this print appears slightly less menacing.
The White Icons series works to bring together some of Haring’s most iconic symbols and the White Icons 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.
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.
