With the same red paint with which he painted the mural earlier that day, he depicted a figure apparently vibrating to the music. That night, Haring reappeared at the Ars Studio and asked De Melero to move his records away from the wall because he wanted to paint. Photograph: Steur/Sunshine/REX/Shutterstock
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The artist died in 1990, a year after his visit to Barcelona. He didn’t have a problem with that.”Ī copy of the original has been preserved at MACBA, the city’s contemporary art museum. He knew that when he painted it, that it was all going to be demolished anyway.
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“No one cared that it was a Keith Haring, people wanted food or drugs or whatever. “The very next day people had drawn penises, graffiti, all sorts of crap on the mural,” De Melero recalls. The mural depicts a snake devouring all before it, under the slogan: “Together we can stop Aids.” Haring died a year later of Aids-related complications.ĭe Melero, who videoed the event, wrote the slogan in Spanish, Todos juntos podemos parar el sida, on a piece of paper for Haring to copy. The morning after that night in the club, De Melero, who is now a top DJ in Ibiza, accompanied Haring to the Plaça Salvador Seguí in el Raval, a known hangout for junkies and prostitutes, where Haring painted a mural on a building that was scheduled for demolition. The bar was a cool hangout in the 1980s, frequented by artists such as Andy Warhol and Haring, as well as musicians, among them Grace Jones and David Byrne. Haring was in Barcelona at the behest of Montse Guillén, a chef at the Internacional Tapas Bar & Restaurant in the Tribeca district of Manhattan. So he painted it with some of his trademark figures and wrote: “This is a real Keith Haring painted on a fake.”Ī CD featuring a copy of the artwork that Haring painted on Cesar de Melero’s Frisbee. That night in the club he showed the artist a Frisbee that was allegedly official Haring merchandise but the artist said he’d never authorised it. “He was such a normal and likable person, not at all vain.” “I liked him before I met him and even more when I did,” he said.
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He was a fan of Haring’s work, which was part of the graffiti and acid house music subculture of the time. To De Melero, all this talk is unseemly and out of keeping with the spirit of openness and generosity with which the mural was painted. Carral said he hasn’t decided whether to sell or donate it to the foundation. He said the Haring has been valued at €80,000 and that the Keith Haring Foundation is willing to pay for the complicated business of removing it. “If it wasn’t for me, it would have disappeared under a coat of paint,” said Gabriel Carral, who runs the billiard hall.Ĭarral claims there is a clause in the rental agreement that gives him the right to the art on the walls. Now the owners plan to demolish the building to build a care home for elderly people and the destination of the Haring is up for grabs. A Polaroid of Haring painting the mural in the Ars Studio club, Barcelona, in 1989.