Keith Haring. The Alphabet

16 March – 24 June 2018
Albertina | Vienna, Austria

To mark what would have been his 60th birthday, the Albertina is devoting a comprehensive retrospective to Keith Haring (1958 - 1990), with nearly 100 works from international museums and private collections.

Beginning with his early subway drawings, the exhibition sheds new light on a fundamental but often under-appreciated aspect of Haring's œuvre: his unique symbolic language, which functions as a sort of artistic alphabet throughout his works.

Through his characteristic stick-figures—which embody a graphic form with prehistoric roots—Haring made reference to the creative principles of graffiti and street art in order to convey a message of justice and change in a language accessible to every human being.