Incollect Magazine - Issue 12

Keith Haring Leaps Back into the Spotlight In his third collaboration with Chef Anthony Gonçalves, Greenwich gallery owner, collector and art dealer Alex Trimper of Trimper Gallery has transformed Gonçalves’s White Plains restaurant, Kanopi, into an intimate gallery space featuring over 35 subway drawings and posters by the late street artist Keith Haring alongside artworks by Lincoln Townley, an oil painter who works with raw graphic lines, pop photographer Tyler Shields, and Kenny Scharf, legendary pop painter and street artist. Trimper first saw Haring’s work as a young boy in the subways of New York, although graffiti, even vandalism; they were “revelatory” to him, Trimper says. Created from roughly 1980 to 1985, Haring’s subway drawings were done with white chalk on the thick black paper the MTA used to cover old advertising posters. “His drawings were immediate, spontaneous, often executed in under two minutes, many times in front of crowds,” Trimper explains. “They were ephemeral by nature, never meant to last. But against all odds, some did.” Trimper began to collect the subway drawings around 2010. “When I began collecting these works, it wasn’t about commodification; it was about stewardship. These drawings were not really commodities, as they were considered pariahs and outcasts of the art world. I knew they were a vital testament, a visual history needing to be preserved. They documented not just Haring’s genius, but cities and our nation’s cultural history and even the artist’s unwavering belief in accessibility, equality, love and visual joy.” Today, the Trimper Gallery and TWS Art Advisors, an investment arm of the gallery owned by Trimper and Donald Wood-Smith, “own or manage one of the most substantial collections of subway drawings in the world,” Trimper says. In addition to Kanopi, Trimper’s subway drawings will be on display in Manhattan as part of The Armory Show in early September, in partnership with the De Buck Gallery, followed by a more extensive presentation (around 35 subway drawings as well as major Haring murals painted on wooden construction panels) at the Rahr-West Art Museum in Manitowoc, WI, running from December 2025 through February 2026, and marking the museum’s 75th anniversary. Venues to see Trimper’s Haring subway drawings: Kanopi, White Plains, through September 30, 2025; The Armory Show, New York, September 5–7, 2025, and the Rahr-West Art Museum in Manitowoc, WI, December 2025 through February 2026. 32 www.incollect.com HAPPENINGS