Kenny Scharf American, b. 1958
"Part of what I do and what I want to do is I want to bring art into the everyday life. If you can take ordinary just walking in the street and you're confronted by something, that might change your day - it might inspire you." -Kenny Scharf
Kenny Scharf (born in Los Angeles, 1958) attended Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts and came of age in the 1980s New York downtown art scene alongside his contemporaries Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. A painter and performer inhabiting the visual worlds of both street art and popular culture, Scharf’s graffiti paintings gained him notoriety and established a vernacular language all his own. Often working with improvisation, he creates playful, gestural pieces that blend stylized motifs with references to the surreal, science fiction, and icons of popular culture. Scharf uses cartoon images in his art work to bring popular culture into the fine arts. Scharf wants to see how far he can push the line between high and low art. Scharf to this day is making art work that makes the viewers think about where the line is and how far has the artist pushed it.
"My personal ambition has always been to live the example. I believe the artist has a social responsibility to engage others in a thought process that ultimately brings art into everyday life thereby enhancing the quality of our experience.” -Kenny Scharf
Many of his larger works still adorn New York streets to this day. Scharf was included in the 1985 Whitney Biennial and again in their show “Fast Forward: Painting from the 1980s” in 2017. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Miami Center for the Fine Arts, Florida, and the Queens Museum of Art, New York, among others. Work by Scharf is held in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Broad Foundation, Los Angeles, and The Jewish Museum, New York, in addition to others worldwide. More recently, Scharf's highly anticipated exhibition at The Brant Foundation in New York City opens November 2024. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
