Manhattan Penis Drawings for Ken Hicks is one of Keith Haring’s most concentrated early series, created during his formative early days in New York City after arriving to study at the School of Visual Arts. The subject is exactly what the title promises – buildings, streets, landmarks and urban activity are repeatedly translated into phallic forms, sometimes through direct visual jokes and sometimes through Haring’s simple transformation of architectural shapes into bodies.

The drawings are in graphite pencil, and are deliberately spare. There is no colour, shading or descriptive background to distract from the central idea, and Haring varies the basic form through repetition, scale, pattern and placement. Some images turn recognisable buildings into erect penises while others treat groups of penises as a crowd or pattern. The effect is comic, but the series also establishes several features that would remain important in Haring’s later erotic work – the reduction of anatomy to a few decisive lines, and the willingness to place explicit sexual imagery inside an otherwise familiar visual language.

Haring’s drawings record his response to the city by turning its visual vocabulary into sexual imagery. The result is less a collection of conventional erotic drawings than a playful, persistent reimagining of Manhattan as a landscape of bodies and penises.

Originally drawn in a spiral-bound notebook, the collection was published in 2016 in book form by the independent Swiss publishing house Nieves Books.