KEITH HARING: LIBERATING THE SOUL
GLADSTONE is pleased to present Liberating the Soul, a dedicated show exclusively to Keith Haring’s canvases and painted tarps.
September 18 – November 01, 2025
Capturing Haring’s enduring concerns for global harmony, accessible healthcare amid the AIDS crisis, and the role of art as an expression of joy and communion, the exhibition marks the first time in ten years that Gladstone has dedicated a show exclusively to Haring’s canvases and painted tarps. Liberating the Soul: Keith Haring’s Paintings will be on view September DE through November D at the gallery’s GHth Street location in New York. Haring is renowned for his pop-inflected subway drawings and public art projects based on an enduring conviction that art should be accessible to everyone.
He is also recognized as a painter of powerful, emotionally charged canvases, which vibrate with evocations of joy and humor, but in other instances, critique the world’s injustices. An avid student of art history and keen interlocuter with his artistic peers, Haring cultivated a rich, formal painting practice in addition to his more outward-facing activities. Fusing his political activism with a spirit of gay pride, two large canvases from DPEQ—predating the artist’s own diagnosis of H.I.V. and AIDS—revel in safe sex practices using graphic visual terms. They imagine a life of unbounded freedom and celebration in a world devoid of homophobia.
Much of Haring’s work is infused with personal content, reflecting upon his own life as an artist in a rich community of creatives including musicians, graffiti artists, writers, and activists. A Pile of Crowns for Jean-Michel Basquiat is a large triangular painting featuring a tower of crowns—Basquiat’s signature motif—an elegiac expression of loss after the artist’s death from an overdose in DPEE. Basquiat and Haring were close, having each started their careers as street artists in early DPEWs, quickly rising to fame and achieving economic success, yet never abandoning their instincts for provocation and visual poetry.