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Untitled (orange drawing), 1987
Price on Request
Details
Medium: felt tip pen on paper
Year: 1987
Sheet size: 18 x 15.5"
Image size: 18 x 15.5"
Framed size: 30 x 25.5"
Signature: signed 'K. Haring' lower left and dated '1987' lower right
Year: 1987
Sheet size: 18 x 15.5"
Image size: 18 x 15.5"
Framed size: 30 x 25.5"
Signature: signed 'K. Haring' lower left and dated '1987' lower right
About the Work
"Untitled (Orange Drawing)" is a hand-signed felt tip pen on paper drawing created by Keith Haring in 1987. The artwork ships framed in a contemporary closed-corner gold leaf frame and has a framed size of 30 x 25.5".
Created in fluorescent orange marker in a New York City nightclub in 1987, this untitled drawing captures Keith Haring’s remarkable ability to transform a fleeting social moment into a fully realized image. In surviving video footage, Haring is seen seated on the floor of a dimly lit club, wearing a sideways cap and a “safe sex” shirt of his own design, smiling and joking with those around him as his marker moves swiftly across the sheet. In just under three minutes, the composition emerges with striking confidence: a dancing, boombox-headed figure animated by Haring’s bold, continuous line.
The image is at once playful, rhythmic, and unmistakably urban. The figure’s body bends and pulses as if responding to the sound projected from its own head, while radiating motion lines around the arms, legs, torso, and boombox create the sensation of music, vibration, and dance. The fluorescent orange marker intensifies the nightclub context, giving the drawing a charged, electric quality that feels inseparable from the environment in which it was made.
Haring’s art was deeply shaped by the energy of New York’s downtown scene, including club culture, street performance, breakdancing, hip-hop, graffiti, and the visual language of mass media. Like many of his most compelling works, this drawing compresses those influences into a direct and instantly legible image. The boombox-headed figure evokes both the communal joy of music and the era’s fascination with portable sound, broadcast culture, and electronic media.
By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the boombox had become a potent emblem of youth culture, urban identity, and public performance. In Haring’s hands, the boombox is not simply an accessory but a transformed head: the body becomes a vehicle for sound, rhythm, and transmission. The figure appears celebratory, even ecstatic, yet it also suggests the merging of body and machine, individuality and mass culture. This tension — between liberation and amplification, dance and broadcast, human gesture and technological mediation — gives the drawing much of its resonance.
The letters “O M” at the upper right remain open to interpretation. Given the circumstances of the drawing’s creation, they may function as a dedication, a set of initials, or a contextual notation connected to the recipient or the nightclub setting. They may also be read visually as part of the drawing’s soundscape, hovering near the boombox like emitted language, initials, or a fragment of club-world shorthand. Without further documentation, their meaning must remain deliberately unresolved.
As a spontaneous nightclub drawing, "Untitled" demonstrates Haring’s extraordinary fluency: his ability to improvise, perform, and compose in real time. The work embodies the immediacy of the moment in which it was made while also speaking to larger themes that run throughout Haring’s art — music, movement, public culture, technology, sexuality, community, and the animated life of the city.
About the Artist
Untitled (orange drawing), 1987
Regular price
$295,000.00
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