Name: Pop Shop V, Plate II
Brand: Keith Haring
Rating: 5 (231 reviews)

Track auction value trend

The value of Keith Haring’s Pop Shop V, Plate II (unsigned) is estimated to be worth between £9,000 and £13,500. This screenprint has shown consistent value growth, with an average annual growth rate of 2%. This work has an auction history of two total sales, both in the last 12 months. The hammer price over the past five years has ranged from £8,315 in March 2022 to £10,576 in June 2023. The average return to the seller is £8,029. The edition size of this artwork is limited to 200.

Auction Date

Auction House

Location

Hammer Price

Return to Seller

Buyer Paid

June 2023

Van Ham Fine Art Auctions

Germany

March 2022

A.N. Abell Auction Company

United States

Meaning & Analysis

Pop Shop V, Plate II is from Pop artist, Keith Haring’s, fifth set of the Pop Shop screen prints. This print was released in 1989 in an edition of 200 and is notable for its combination of red, pink and turquoise. The dolphin and androgynous figure play out a joyful scene reminiscent of a comic strip, and boldly outlined in black, the figures recall Haring’s beginnings in street art and his earliest ‘subway drawings’ that made his name while he was still a student.

By the time this print was made, Haring was at the top of his career yet sadly only one year from his death. A few years before he had opened his first Pop Shop in Manhattan’s SoHo, selling badges, t-shirts and more from as little as 50 cents, in a bid to make his art more commercially accessible to everyone. This transition from painting to multiples also led to Haring’s adoption of screen printing – a commercial technique made popular by Andy Warhol in the ’60s – which offered him the chance to experiment with colour and line in large editions. Printed in five colours – black, pink, orange, purple and turquoise – this work shows Haring’s mastery of screen printing as a medium.

It soon became evident that the energy and curiosity he demonstrated for painting translated perfectly into printmaking and he began to work with publishers across the US, Switzerland, Japan, Germany, France, Denmark and Holland. The prints featuring singular images were released as portfolios of four, each from an edition of 200, while the Quad prints— compiling four images in a grid format— were released in an edition of 75. Totalling 875 prints featuring the pink-orange-turquoise Pop Shop V artworks and exemplifying the prolific productivity of Haring’s printmaking, each individual print nevertheless reflects the attentive care paid by Haring throughout the production process. Though initially the singular Pop Shop V prints were released as four-part portfolios (and remain extremely valuable in their original sets of matching edition numbers) many portfolios have inevitably been divided.

By the time of his death, Haring had produced so many prints that the exact number has become impossible to count. There are many unsigned editions on the market, though these tend only to be considered valuable if approved by the Keith Haring Foundation. Today his prints are frequently among the most sought after multiples on the market.