Here we bring together individual paintings and drawings in which sex, the naked body, desire and queer sexuality are central to Keith Haring’s subjects. They are shown in chronological order, spanning his career from the late 1970s to 1990, and ranging from rapidly executed black and white drawings to large, intensely coloured paintings and prints.

The earliest works establish the ‘Haring look’, in which he reduces the human body to a few decisive contours, using the same animated lines for limbs, genitals and faces. Bodies overlap, penetrate, embrace and transform into one another. Repetition and radiating lines add a sense of physical energy.

As Haring's work developed, sexual imagery became increasingly entangled with his wider repertoire of symbols. Hearts, animals, machines, crosses, flying objects and phallic forms appear in many compositions concerned with sex and the body. In Saint Sebastian (1984) for example, the Christian martyr becomes a vehicle for imagery involving the body, penetration and violence.

Haring's erotic drawings were not simply preparatory exercises for his better-known public work. He maintained a body of explicitly sexual material that was separate from the work he made for children and the general public. Sexual themes increasingly entered his public work during the 1980s, particularly as gay sexuality, AIDS and safe sex became unavoidable parts of his personal and political experience. Safe Sex demonstrates the change particularly clearly, with sexual imagery becoming an instrument of public communication.

Some of the drawings are playful, affectionate, or frankly comic, while others involve bondage, penetration, bodily transformation and aggression. Haring has no fixed boundary between erotic pleasure and the darker aspects of the body. The same simplified figure can represent desire in one image and vulnerability in another, becoming particularly apparent in works from the later 1980s when his sexual imagery increasingly intersected with his response to the AIDS epidemic.