KEITH HARING, FLOWERS V, FLOWERS SERIES, SIGNED SCREEN PRINT, EDITION OF 100, 1990
Flowers V is a screen print from Keith Haring’s Flowers series (1990) that shows an image of a large flower rendered in thick, dark outlines filled out with bright, vibrant strokes. Haring uses bright pastel colours of blue, yellow and orange against a vivid red backdrop to create a playful and lively image.
In his choice of colour palette and simplified form, Haring creates an aesthetically pleasing print, however the Flowers series explicitly references subversive themes surrounding HIV/AIDS, sexuality, life and death. Haring uses flowers as symbols of nature’s ephemerality and the fleeting impermanence of human life. In rendering the subject to look phallic, Haring makes clear the stigma experience 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.
Haring injects this print with an otherworldly quality in its use of saturated colours and the flower’s unusual, abstracted form. Further to this, coloured dots are used by Haring to denote the otherness of homosexuality and illness, specifically AIDS, at the time. Flowers V aptly expresses Haring’s feelings of otherness and closeness to death in 1990.
Read more about Flowers by Keith Haring.
ABOUT KEITH HARING
Known for his bold graphic style and playful sense of humour, Keith Haring is one of the most influential and adored artists of the 20th century.
Born in Pennsylvania, in 1958, Haring was a talented draughtsman as a child and developed his cartoonish style at the hands of his father and the work of Walt Disney and Dr Seuss. However it would take some time before he realised he could marry this kind of drawing with being a fine artist. Upon graduating from high school he enrolled in a commercial art school before realising he had little interest in pursuing a career as an illustrator or graphic designer. After dropping out of college he joined the hippie movement and hitchhiked across the country where he made anti-Nixon t-shirts to pay for food and Grateful Dead tickets. Learn more about Keith Haring.
