Keith Allan Haring was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on 4 May 1958. He got early into cartoons and comic strips and loved to draw. After leaving High School in 1976, he visited the 'Ivy School of Professional Art' in Pittsburgh for a year, where he studied the works of Paul Klee, Jean Dubuffet, Marc Tobey and Jackson Pollock and completed a large number of abstract drawings. When he was just 20 years old in 1978, Haring had his first one-man show at the 'Pittsburgh Center for the Arts' and moved to the 'School of Visual Arts' in New York. In New York, he also met Francesco Clemente, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, William S. Borroughs and other artists, who soon became close friends. Haring found inspiring motifs in the city's graffiti art, a technique he also used for his drawing style since 1980. At that time, he developed a dog -like animal as his 'tag', which became an inherent part of his iconography. The same way a whole vocabulary of reduced figurative signs, which populated Keith Haring's image world, came into existence. In the New York subway he executed the famous chalk drawings on black stuck-on advertising surfaces, with which the artist attracted a good deal of attention. He had his breakthrough with an exhibition at Tony Shafrazi's gallery in 1982, in which he linked his already well-known art to his name. Invitations to exhibitions in Europe followed immediately. A special focus of Haring's work was always on social commitment. Haring had 20,000 posters printed for an anti-nuclear demonstration in 1982, which he distributed in Central Park. He painted for UNICEF, against AIDS, apartheid in South Africa, illiteracy and drug abuse. Again and again children were in the centre of his efforts. In the time that follows, Haring created a number of murals and organised spectacular body-painting sessions, the first being in London in 1983. In the 1980s, he received many international commissions for stage sets, costume designs, advertising spots and music videos. Large exhibitions ins America and Europe added to the artist's increasing fame. Haring now received more and more orders for major projects, such as the 'Billboard Project', which he developed in 1986 together with Jenny Holzer for the Vienna Festival. The same year Haring opened his Pop Shop in New York, in which he sold souvenirs with his motifs. Between 1986 and 1989, he regularly organised drawing and painting workshops for children. This commitment peaked in 1989 with the realisation of a 152 m long wall painting in Chicago, which Haring created with 300 students from Chicago's high schools. At the end of 1988 Haring realised that he contracted AIDS. The artist died in New York on 16 February 1990 from an AIDS-related illness.