”My drawings don’t try to imitate life; they try to create life, to invent life. That’s a much more so-called primitive idea, which is the reason that my drawings look like they could be Aztec or Egyptian pr Aboriginal… and why they have so much in common with them. It has the same attitude towards drawing: inventing images. You’re sort of depicting life, but you’re not trying to make it life-like.”
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By the mid-eighties Keith Haring travelled, like many of his predecessors and contemporaries, to the modernist art capital Paris where he worked in the studio of his friend George Condo. Inspired by the primary colour palette of Mondrian, Léger and Calder and the “primitivist” influences that shaped the pioneering modern styles of Brancusi, Braque and Picasso, Haring created Red-Yellow-Blue, a series consisting of 26 canvasses. Exploring a variety of influences ranging from Maori tattoos, African dances and masks, Christian religion to Native American headdresses, this joyous portrait series is substantially different from his iconic unisex figures. For example, the series contains a portrayal of his last studio assistant Adolfo Arena but also portrayals of animals like a dancing Giraffe, a crucified fantasy creature with two heads and trunks that looks like an Indian goddess, a dancing robot, a hare with a tribal headdress and a dog with a trunk that is surrounded by bones.
Red-Yellow-Blue #20 looks like a modern adaptation of a Christian easter bunny, an Easter bunny with a sassy attitude to be exact. The hare, also a Christian symbol of new life, the virgin Mary and the holy trinity, gives the impression it was painted only minutes ago with the fresh paint still dripping of the canvas. With only a limited number of means, like the use of fluent lines, a colour palette consisting only of the primary colours + black and white and a merging of Christian & tribal iconography Haring playfully merges cultures and beliefs in order to address and challenge rusted views and stereotypes.
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