Colorful, lively, bizarre, childish, ironic, provocative. This is the world of Keith Haring, American painter and street artist to whom an exhibition housed at the Royal Palace in Milan pays tribute. 110 works, many large, some unpublished or never exhibited in Italy, from public and private collections from Usa, Europe and Asia. A unique opportunity to evoke the career of the man who made his debut at the end of the Seventies, and later became the main exponent of the art of graffiti.
The exhibition in Milan analyzes the deep meaning and the complexity of Haring's works, highlighting his relationship with art history. The American's works are compared with his sources of inspiration, from archeology to classic pre-Columbian art, from archetypal figures of religions to Pacific masks, from the creations of Native Americans until the Twentieth century masters such as Jackson Pollock, Jean Dubuffet and Paul Klee.
Summarizing archetypes of the classic tradition, tribal and ethnographic art, Gothic and cartoon imaginary, languages of his century and excursions into the future with the use of computers in some of his latest experiments, Haring created a universe populated by radioactive kids, cartoon and comic books characters, exotic and primitive references, images of the underground culture.
Evident that the work of Haring was an expression of a counterculture socially and politically committed to the issues of his time: drugs, AIDS (the disease that killed the artist when he was only 31 years old), the nuclear threat, the youth alienation, racial discrimination, the arrogance of power.