Image via Complex Original
Even if you don't know the name Keith Haring, you definitely recognize his pop artwork and the "radiant baby" icon for which he is best known. His maze-like patterns and archetypal figures celebrate life and unity with an optimistic tone.
Haring's entrance into art was the New York Subway system, where he displayed his street art in the 1980s. Maintaining strong ties to graffiti culture throughout his entire career, Haring's bold, energetic, and colorful style went global, from the streets to the inside of galleries and on all kinds of merchandise. Haring often explored sexuality in his artwork and also used his art as a way to promote gay rights, AIDS awareness, and safe sex.
Today would have been Keith Haring's 56th birthday. He died at the young age of 31, leaving an amazingly strong legacy and a large body of work behind. We remember him today with 20 Artists to Check Out If You Like Keith Haring. Some of them, like Basquiat and LA II, knew and worked with Haring during his lifetime, while other more contemporary figures pay tribute to his artistic style and tradition.
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Aaron De La Cruz
Location: Los Angeles
De La Cruz's murals play with the ideas of framework, deliberation, and freedom. He uses a fairly standard pattern in many of his paintings, breaking it and reforming it to intersect the mechanical with the organic. Similar to Haring's bold designs, De La Cruz's maze-like paintings are hypnotic and full of energy.
Jim Joe
Location: New York
Jim Joe remains anonymous but is known for his poetic scrawlings that can be found throughout NYC. Though no one knows his true identity, he has been featured in exhibitions at MoMa, The Hole, and The Toronto Art Gallery, among others. Jim Joe's main inspiration is Marcel Duchamp, though his artworks are mainly cryptic messages. The surfaces upon which he chooses to write can be considered found art. He usually signs his work with his name and the year.
Jim Houser
Location: Philadelphia
Painter and graphic artist Jim Houser's art includes a muted palette of colors and an array of flat shapes that he arranges to create contemporary scenes. He got his beginnings as an artist within the pages of zines and sketchbooks. Many of his paintings are collage-like amalgamations of color blocks, words, and characters, as if he compiled various sketchbook pages together into one composition. Like Keith Haring, he invents characters and scenes that reduce familiar objects to their most basic and recognizable forms.
FUZI
Location: Perpignan, France
FUZI's artistic goal is "to be everywhere-on people's skins, in newspapers, in galleries, on the streets, and inside your brain." One of the few street artists who doubles not only as a fine artist, but as a tattoo artist, he appears to be accomplishing this goal. (FUZI even tattooed a "Lucky You" horseshoe on Scarlett Johansson's ribcage.) He innovates with his "Ignorant Style," which aims to break street art conventions and reclaim the wild, unpredictable attitude that graffiti was founded upon. His work, whether it be on a wall, a canvas, or a foot, all bears his trademark cartoon-like, fun, and irreverent style.
Curtis Kulig
Location: New York
Kulig first gained recognition from the tags that he spread throughout New York City that simply stated, "Love Me." (Often with the "M" in a subtle curve to resemble a heart.) The "Love Me" Campaign caught on for its simplicity and its universality; Kulig spread a simple sentiment relatable to people of all ages and walks of life. Like Haring, Kulig's artistic work strives towards unity, beginning in the streets and finding itself in fine art galleries and on merchandise. Currently, Curtis Kulig works mainly in portrait photography, but he also continues to paint.
Ken Done
Location: Sydney
Done's colorful, optimistic paintings have become representative of Sydney's landscape for tourists and residents alike. Active since the 1980s, his oil paintings depict his surroundings in flattened shapes, vibrant with color. He often paints Sydney Harbor or beach and nautical scenes that draw the viewer into his lush, sun-soaked surroundings celebrating life.
Takashi Murakami
Location: Tokyo
In order to avoid a faltering Japanese art market, Takashi Murakami first broke into the American art scene in the 1990s before exporting himself back to Japan. He often focuses on "low" culture in his work, such as anime and the otaku subculture, which are subjects he finds both uniquely Japanese and appealing to an international audience. Murakami paints in a superflat style; he coined the term "superflat" to describe two-dimensional Japanese animation and legitimized the style within the fine art world. His alter-ego "Mr. Dob" appears in many of his paintings and sculptures, as well.
KAWS
Location: New York
KAWS' most recognizable works are his interpretations of popular cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse, Spongebob Squarepants, The Simpsons, and the Michelin Man. Working in painting and sculpture, his portrayals tend to be slightly sinister, typically with X-d out eyes. Like Haring, KAWS repeats the same images in his artwork, with the aim of being universally understood despite language or culture.
Barry Mcgee
Location: San Francisco
McGee's loud paintings and installations are impossible not to look at. They often combine many different patterns and shapes into scenes of organized mayhem. He made a splash in the fine arts scene in 2005 with his "One More Thing" exhibition at Deitch Projects, in which he filled the display space with upended trucks covered in his characteristic graffiti tags and street art designs.
Stephen Powers
Location: New York
Powers, like Haring, is a graffiti artist turned studio artist. In his early days, he painted under the pseudnym 'ESPO," which stands for Exterior Surface Painting Outreach. He would paint in broad daylight and identify himself as a member of the official-sounding ESPO when questioned. In his street art and in his studio art, he combines enigmatic words and phrases with bold lines and images, tying these elements together with a 50s-style pop art aesthetic.
Invader
Location: France
Invader, a French graffiti artist who, similar to Banksy, keeps his identity anonymous, has constructed an elaborate framework for his artwork. He carefully plans the location of each mosaic—each is an invasion and he himself is the invader or hacker. His recognizable artworks usually replicate 8-bit characters such as Pacman or Super Mario characters. Though the mosaics and his modus operandi are playful and fun, Invader's terminology alludes to the subversive nature of his work.
Donald Baechler
Location: New York
Bachler's collage-style paintings tend to layer simple renderings of familiar objects over more abstract backgrounds, ranging from newspaper clippings to color blocks. Similar to Haring's hieroglyphic style, the objects in Baechler's paintings are easy to identify, yet their meaning is not always apparent.
El Xupet Negre
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Like Haring's radiant baby, which appears in many of his pieces, El Xupet Negre's black pacifier is a symbol instantly recognized as the artist's signature. He rose to fame in Spain by tagging the black pacifier onto every blank wall he could find. El Xupet Negre dubbed his guerilla-style signing logo art, and as the first artist to tag in this way, he influenced the graffiti world tremendously.
POSE and REVOK
Locations: POSE: Chicago; REVOK: Los Angeles
REVOK and POSE are two of the most prominent street artists working today and have collaborated on murals and exhibitions. Both artists splice varying shapes, colors, textures, and images together to create striking collage-like paintings. Their larger-than-life murals give the viewer a sense of motion.
Shepard Fairey
Location: Los Angeles
Shepard Fairey rose from the skate scene with his "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" sticker campaign in the 1990s and became a household name during the 2000s for his "HOPE" portrait of Obama. Like Haring, Shepard first made a name for himself in the artistic underground before entering the upper echelons of the art world. Fairey often uses highly stylized, color-blocked artwork to make political or social statements.
George Condo
Location: New York
You may recognize George Condo's name from his work with Kanye West for the My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy album art. One of the most influential artists currently on the scene, Condo was also a contemporary of Haring. Many of his portraits depict abstract subjects painted in a realistic manner; he coined the term "artificial realism." The distorted proportions of his subjects' faces lend an unnerving quality to his work, similar to the feeling accompanied by many of Haring's darker pieces.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Location: New York
Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring knew each other while active in New York's street art and fine art scenes. Both active neo-expressionists, they worked in a bold, colorful, reductive style. At Basquiat's funeral, Haring spoke of his friend, saying, "He disrupted the politics of the art world and insisted that if he had to play their games, he would make the rules. His images entered the dreams and museums of the exploiters, and the world can never be the same." Haring's 1988 painting, A Pile of Crowns for Jean-Michel Basquiat, honored the late artist's legacy.
LA II
Location: New York
LA II, also known as LA2 or LA Rock, caught Keith Haring's attention at the age of 13 with his graffiti tags. After meeting, the duo collaborated extensively and exhibited together internationally. LA II continues to create a wide variety of artistic items, from traditional canvases to skate decks, masks, and more. The bold, maze-like patterns in his art resemble Haring's style, though the inclusion of more dots and squiggles between the lines also reminds us of Australian Aboriginal artwork.
Raymond Pettibon
Location: New York
Pettibon's nightmarish, comic-book style drawings parallel Haring's socially conscious subject matter. Often depicting anti-authoritarian messages, Pettibon uses bold lines and figure drawings. Some are familiar with Pettibon based on his older brother founding the punk rock band Black Flag.
Kenny Scharf
Location: Los Angeles
Kenny Scharf paints murals, sculpts, and creates traditional paintings and prints. His work is bold and colorful, like much of Haring's, and also has a cartoon-like, abstract feel. Scharf aims to reach out beyond the confines of the elitist art world and connect with popular culture. Haring and Scharf were friends and also roommates at one point.