Looking Back At Four Decades Of Kenny Scharf To Find Our Future

At 22-inches high by 26.5 inches wide, the acrylic on canvas with aluminum frame is one of the smaller artworks among more than 70 paintings, sculptures, and objects created by Scharf since the late 1970s on view at The Brant Foundation through February 28. Co-curated by industrialist and art collector Peter M. Brant and art dealer, gallery owner, and artist Tony Shafrazi, in close collaboration with the artist, Kenny Scharf is a breathtaking survey compiled from the Brant collections alongside major loans from institutions and private collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and The Broad in Los Angeles.

You can derive deviant joy from Scharf’s surrealist, psychedelic scenes, but don’t dismiss his whimsy as California dreaming. There’s far more to the picture than meets the eye. My writer-husband Mike, our 14-year-old, 1980s-counter-culture-loving son Michael, and I delighted in meeting Scharf on November 9, 2024, as we traversed the 16,400-square-foot East Village structure that served as a ConEd substation in 1920s and as the home and studio of artist, sculptor, illustrator and composer Walter De Maria from the mid-1980s until his death in 2013.

Exploring the 7,000 square feet of exhibition across four floors with ceilings as high as 32 feet, we encountered many works for the first time, including Scharf’s “Ultima Suprema Deluxa,” a behemoth 1961 Cadillac Sedan de Ville, tricked out with customized paintwork and plastic dinosaurs, as we exited through the gift shop.

“I used to drive that around back when I painted it in the ‘80s,” Scharf recalled during a December 18, 2024, Zoom. “It’s crazy.”

Scharf led me on a virtual tour of the gardens outside his Culver City, Los Angeles, cottage home, thriving with cacti, cannabis, succulents, and palm trees, and adorned with installations made from found objects, recycled household goods, and travel souvenirs. Though he made his global name in the 1980s East Village and Lower East Side, Scharf was first associated with the underground Lowbrow Movement that emerged in the Los Angeles area in the late 1960s.

“Mangoes, passion fruits. I have a lot of marijuana. I have plums. And here’s the entrance, and then we’ll go inside and talk. Here’s my studio, real quick, if you want to see plants, a lot of plants. See the vines. And then, of course, paintings,” Scharf said. “It’s a pretty cool spot.”

The most fertile time and place in contemporary art history, the 1980s East Village art scene remains unrivaled as the birthplace of Neo-Expressionism, Neo-Pop, and Street Art, and for an enduring impact on any remnant of rebellious creativity energy left swirling like Scarf’s ubiquitous and singular cosmic shapes.

“I like the word remnants, because that’s what I see. I see remnants,” Scarf lamented. “New York is always New York, thank God, but it changes like everywhere.”

Though he returned to Los Angeles after a whirlwind visit for the opening, Scharf’s impact on the neighborhood (Brant Foundation is in the East Village) remains indelible. Scharf’s third solo show presented by TOTAH gallery in the neighboring Lower East Side, MYTHOLOGEEZ, was on view between September 4, 2024, and December 7, 2024, and his painted chair swing ride is showcased in Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy, an exhibition homage to the world’s first art amusement park at The Shed through February 23.

“It’s decades of manifesting,” said Scharf of the concurrent exhibitions. “I’ve known and been involved with Tony (Shafrazi) and Peter (Brant) for decades, and I was there at the beginning when Peter was creating his foundation and the space and everything. So obviously, it’s something that I had hoped for. There’s nothing like being alive in the now, whenever it happens. So I’m happy about it. It’s such a beautiful building, what a great space. And when I’m on the roof, I can look over at my old apartment where I made some of that work. So that’s also very nostalgic, but in a good way of nostalgic. It’s like, there it is. It’s my history, right there.”

Looking back on his array of subjects – portraits of celebrities in his own universe, seminal cartoon characters, and plants and animal and glob creatures that he created – Scharf encounters his own magnitude and prophecy.

“When the Worlds Collide, the Whitney’s painting (executed in 1984), is very big and very all encompassing. And it’s hard not to feel something when you’re standing in front of it, partly because of its size,” Scharf said of the monumental oil and acrylic spray paint on canvas that hangs more than 10-feet high and nearly 17-and-a-half feet wide. “That one was kind of groundbreaking in a way.”

When thinking about how his past work influences his future work, Scharf recalls Barbara Simpson’s New Kitchen (1978), painted when he was a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).

“I realized, talking about it, thinking about it, that the content of that painting is the theme of all of my work. It’s like having this moment of your joy and ignoring the shit at the same time, and that’s kind of what that lady’s doing, and that’s kind of what my characters are doing. There’s chaos going on, and there’s destruction and all this shit, yet we’re still alive. And that’s kind of how I feel all the time. So I looked at that painting and I thought about it. So I think I’m making, well .., I don’t even want to reveal what I’m going to do, but I’m doing something with that painting.”

Recognizing the enduring timelessness of its content, Scharf revisited his Judy Jetson on the Beach (1987), painting by creating “a newer, bigger, better version” in 1998.

“There’s this couple at the beach. They’re not even enjoying the beach. They’re watching TV, which is kind of (predicting) seeing people at the beach on their phones,” quipped Scharf. “It drives me crazy when people are at the beach and they’re on their phones. … (In the painting) they’re watching some show spiral. They’re hypnotized, just like people on their phones. Meanwhile, the earth just had a bomb exploding on the horizon. So it’s about the same thing. It’s always the same thing. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m watching this show.’ It seems more relevant than ever to me. … And I don’t like to do that, always be the doom and gloom. But, will someone please listen to me? It’s almost too late, but it’s not. Come on everybody.”