Photostat print in red on light tan wove paper, 1981. Signed K. Haring in ink. With the stamp signature, date Feb. 3, 1981, and copyright.
S. 107.5 x 149.5 cm.
With frame 115.5 x 154.5 cm.
Provenance
Westbeth Painter's Space, New York, 1981
Private collection, Stockholm
During the early 1980s, soon after relocating from Pennsylvania to New York to pursue his dream to become a successful visual artist, Haring began drawing in white chalk on black, unused advertisement boards in New York City subway stations. He transformed the subway stations into his canvas, scrawling his unique visual vernacular, featuring entwined figures, barking dogs, flying saucers, angels, pyramids, dolphins, computers, smiley faces, and radiant babies across surfaces that were visible to the millions who used the public transport system annually, quickly becoming a rising star on the New York art scene.
Haring produced drawings and paintings voraciously during his early years in New York, sometimes creating as many as forty paintings in a single day. He often took his drawings to a local blueprint shop in lower Manhattan to have them reproduced as unique photostats as a record of his work. In February 1981, he had his first solo exhibition at Westbeth Painter's Space in the West Village, which consisted of many drawings that incorporated the visual vocabulary that he was also developing through his subway drawings.
Haring recalled this inaugural exhibition of his work in New York, "The exhibition lasted for one week, during which time I sold several blueprint copies of the drawings, but no original drawings. Since then many of the drawings have been sold and I don't know their whereabouts. However, before I sold any of them I made photostats of each of the drawings. . . . They form a perfect time capsule of my beginning in New York City." In early 1990, at peak of his artistic fame and just prior to his early death of AIDS-related complications on February 16, 1990, a series of seventeen different screenprints of the "The Blueprint Drawings" was issued in a limited edition series (see Littmann pages 174-183).
This imagery of this unique photostat in red from 1981 was used in "The Blueprint Drawings" limited edition screenprint series in 1990 as "The Blueprint Drawing: Print 3".
