Hamptons Fine Art Fair 2022

From July 14 to 17, 2022, in Southampton, Zeit Contemporary Art's booth at the Hamptons Fine Art Fair staged a dialogue between Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, two defining figures in Pop Art's evolution across the second half of the twentieth century. The two artists first met in 1982, when photographer Christopher Makos brought Haring to Warhol's Factory. Their visual languages differed, but both expanded the boundaries of high art, engaged mass media and popular imagery, and treated art as a direct form of public communication.

Haring's side of the dialogue centered on his complete Icons portfolio, created in 1990, the final year of the artist's life. Its five embossed screenprints gather some of Haring's most recognizable symbolic figures around themes of life, death, innocence, desire, and human vulnerability. Seen as a group, they read as a concentrated reflection on the full range of human experience, and as one of his final statements in printmaking. Alongside it, the complete Pop Shop IV suite from 1989 brought forward emblematic motifs like the barking dog and radiant baby that became central to Haring's visual legacy.

Warhol's side turned on his own recurring motifs. There was the Cow imagery, first introduced as wallpaper at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1966. There were 1980s paintings, including Candy Box and a Valentine-themed Ad painting made for a heart-health charity appeal, both reflecting on affection and love through the language of advertising. A 1978 Polaroid came from the Bananas series, and the 1964 screenprint Birmingham Race Riot, related to the Death and Disaster series, used a stark press image of violence to examine media circulation and public trauma. Set against Haring's Icons and Pop Shop IV, these works showed how one artistic ambition, art as public communication, could produce such different visual languages within a single generation.