Frequenting the backrooms and public baths where the gay community hung out, the sex that haunted his nights soon became the fruit and the main inspiration of his research. In 1978, at the height of the sexual revolution, Keith Haring arrived in New York and attended the School of Visual Arts. Throughout his life, from when he began in the late seventies up to his death in 1990, Keith Haring produced work that was both intense and explicit around sex and sexuality. So sex is not always free from the taboos that hem it in. Yet even today, Jeff Koons’s work, books and films by Virginie Despentes and Catherine Breillat, and the confessions of Catherine Millet continue to be on everyone’s lips. Boundaries have been breached, values have shattered and showing sex is increasingly permissible.
Thirty years have already gone by since the sexual liberation of the seventies.
Three years after organizing the exhibitions Keith Haring – Made in France at the Musee Maillol and Keith Haring – 12 sculptures at the gallery, Jerome de Noirmont is pleased to present a Keith Haring exhibition entitled sex Show, from September 19 to November 16, that through a dozen canvases and some forty drawings, will highlight the crucial importance of sex and sexuality in the artist’s life and work.
