In 1987, Keith Haring sat down at a Commodore Amiga computer and made five digital paintings for a Timothy Leary video game that was never released. Nearly four decades later, those works are being exhibited for the first time at the scale Haring envisioned, not as archival curiosities, but as large-scale immersive installations, bathing the viewer in programmable light.
Martos Gallery is pleased to present Keith Haring: More Light, an exhibition drawn from the collection of Jeannie Vu and Jehan Chu. Its title comes from Goethe’s reported final words, “More light,” and the show honors that cry in full: this is the first exhibition to realize Haring’s own ambition for his digital work, displayed at a scale commensurate with his most celebrated public practice.
The five works that comprise the Amiga series were created between February and April 1987 for Neuromancer: Mind Movie, an unrealized collaboration with Timothy Leary. They represent the apex of a nearly decade-long inquiry into the digital image, a body of work cut short by Haring’s death in 1990, and by the technological limitations of his era, which made large-scale presentation impossible within his lifetime. That barrier no longer exists.
More Light is, in this sense, an act of posthumous realization. Guided by Haring’s central snake motif, the works move from psychedelic visions of expanded consciousness to darker, more elegiac meditations, the body as signal, screen, and ghost. They were made in the shadow of Andy Warhol’s death in February 1987, a loss that visibly shifted Haring’s practice from mandala-inspired optimism toward a reckoning with mortality and legacy. On the screen, the pixel offered what the street wall could not: permanence. A unit of light that could outlast the body.
Haring understood, with the acuity of someone watching his own image become commodity, that the digital offered a different kind of ubiquity, one with staying power. He was making work for a generation not yet born. More Light is the exhibition that finally reaches them.
The exhibition was conceived in collaboration with internationally acclaimed architect Kulapat Yantrasast, with an accompanying essay by digital art historian Noah Bolanowski.
