'Boxers' takes a dive to Stuttgart
Keith Haring's graffiti-style Berlin public landmark gets "extraordinary rendition" by private owners.
BERLIN (23. June, 2025) — Without so much as a “By your leave,” Mercedes-Benz has quietly kidnapped a popular Berlin landmark — Keith Haring’s graffiti-style “Boxers” sculpture — with a grand-plan to haul it off to Stuttgart. (That’s Stoor’-guhtt, in the local dialect.)
Here’s the story:
The accomplished and very popular American artist, Keith Haring made the welded steel-and-laquer sculpture in 1987, the year after he installed (=spray-painted) his work on our own Berlin Wall. Like the best of Berlin artists — or like his successor, Banksy — Haring devoted much of his time to public artwork, work that carried its own upbeat, colorful social-messaging, as applied (radically, illegally) to NYC subway walls. [Haring’s style was born within the pioneering urban graffiti-as-public-art movement, starting in 1973, with United Graffiti Artists (UGA ).]
In today’s New York, Haring also is remembered for his fight against AIDS, with which he was diagnosed in 1988, the year after he made his mark on the Berlin Wall. Haring died of AIDS in 1990, the year after the Wall famously evaporated as a political border, and became more famous as a poured-concrete canvas for street art.
In Haring’s time, the breach of the Berlin Wall launched a series of collapsing tired, old barriers; also borders-of-the-mind fell; like dominos, including Botha’s racist Apartheid regime, in far-away South Africa. It was like this quasi-orgasmic wave of social-progressive delight for billions of people around the globe; and, happily, Haring was alive long enough to see the first of it. (Nationalists and militarists, conversely, were like deer-caught-in-the-headlights; they largely didn’t know what to do — except perhaps to get out of the road & cover their tracks.…)
“(A)rt is not an elitist activity, reserved
for the appreciation of a few,
but for everyone."
— Keith Haring
"It is becoming increasingly clear to me that art is not an elitist activity reserved for the appreciation of a few, but for everyone,” said Haring. “(A)nd that is the end toward which I will continue to work.”
In 1989, Haring established the Keith Haring Foundation, its mandate being to provide funding and imagery to AIDS organizations and children’s programs. The Keith Haring Foundation also continues its efforts today, expanding audiences for Haring’s artwork “through exhibitions, publications and the licensing of his images.” In this way, his foundation sustains Haring’s own very difficult final struggle — speaking openly about the “new illness” that was killing him, while generating activism and awareness about AIDS, gay/trans life, etc.
In 1998, the “Boxers” sculpture was installed on a distant edge of Potsdamer Platz, near the Berlin City-State Library. I could find nothing about the work’s Berlin dedication, nor provenance before being purchased in 1996 by what was then Daimler-Benz and today’s Mercedes-Benz Art Collection.
In the dark of night, Berlin’s daring Haring ‘Boxers’ has been transformed into “a visible symbol of Mercedes-Benz’s social commitment to art …and Stuttgart.”
This year — according to a press announcement by the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection — the Haring sculpture “will be installed on the roundabout between the Mercedes-Benz Museum and the Mercedes-Benz Group AG headquarters in Stuttgart-Untertürkheim.” There, at the car-company headquarters, Berlin’s daring Haring will become “a visible symbol of Mercedes-Benz’s social commitment to art, culture and….” (Wait for it….) “Stuttgart.”
Yielding to the perhaps-too-easy literary metaphor, this German-American art-historian says, “The work of American artist Keith Haring has been subjected to ‘extraordinary rendition’ — snatched from ‘Bär-Town’ in the dark of night, and given a life-term sentence — well out of public view; no longer seen by millions — in a high-security, private facility in Stuttgart.”
As Brando put it: “The horror…. The horror.”
SOURCES:
https://www.mercedes-benz.art/en/artwork/untitled-boxers-keith-haring-1987-2/
https://www.haring.com/!/about-haring/bio
https://ilchaos.com/arte/pittura/keith-haring-writers-o-graffitista-e-radiant-boy/
https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/keith-haring-sculpture-drawings-in-space