Kenny Scharf
-
Kozmik, 2001
Kenny Scharf was born in Los Angeles in 1958 and grew up in the San Fernando Valley, in the first generation raised entirely inside television. He moved to New York to study at the School of Visual Arts, taking his BFA in 1980, and fell in with the circle around Club 57 on St Mark's Place — a church-basement venue where Keith Haring programmed exhibitions and film nights and where performance, painting and party were not separable activities. Jean-Michel Basquiat was a friend and, for a period, a roommate. Scharf has lived and worked in Los Angeles for many years.
The vocabulary arrived early and has not fundamentally changed. Scharf paints in high-key acrylic and spray enamel: bulbous cartoon faces, blobs with eyes, jungle foliage, atomic-age domestic appliances, and heads that grin, melt or scream. The sources are Hanna-Barbera and mid-century advertising rather than art history — a deliberate choice, since the point was to work with the imagery that had actually raised him. Against that, he sets a painter's handling: colour that fluoresces and bleeds, surfaces worked wet, forms that dissolve at their edges. The results sit between Pop and Surrealism without settling in either.
Two long-running strands sit outside the paintings. The Cosmic Cavern, first made in a spare room at his and Haring's shared Times Square studio in 1981 and remade dozens of times since, is a blacklit environment of fluorescent junk, painted furniture and found plastic, entered rather than viewed. The customised appliances — televisions, telephones, refrigerators encrusted in plastic toys and paint — turn the objects of consumer optimism into reliquaries. Both take his central subject seriously: a manufactured world so saturated in colour and promise that it becomes hallucinatory, and so disposable that it is already waste.
That double reading has become explicit over time. Jungle imagery recurs as ecological argument rather than decoration — his 1989 exhibition contribution was titled to say so plainly — and the plastic in his sculptures is salvaged. He has painted murals in public space throughout his career, from the Houston Bowery Wall in New York in 2010 to walls in Miami, Minneapolis, Malaga, Detroit and Copenhagen, holding to the position that art has no reason to stop at the gallery door.
Scharf showed at the Fun Gallery in 1982 and with Tony Shafrazi from 1983, and was included in the Whitney Biennial in 1985, Aperto at the Venice Biennale in 1984, and the São Paulo Biennial in 1983.
Museum surveys include Scharf-O-Rama at the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale in 1995, El Mundo de Kenny Scharf at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey in 1996, Pop Surrealist at the Salvador Dalí Museum in 1997, Super Pop Universe at the Lotte Museum of Art, Seoul in 2018, and a solo presentation at the Brant Foundation, New York, in 2024. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Stedelijk Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, among others.
SELECTED CV
Born 1958, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA
Education and Training
1980 BFA, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY, USA
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2026 ShimiShimiKao!, Nanzuka, Tokyo, Japan
2025 Jungle Jungle Jungle, Almine Rech, Brussels, Belgium
2024 Go Wild, Honor Fraser, Los Angeles, CA, USA
2024 Mythologeez, Totah, New York, NY, USA
2024 26 Œuvres sur papier, Villa Navarra, Le Muy, France
2023 Evolution Revolution, Journal Gallery, New York, NY, USA
2023 I'm Baaaak, with Cosmic Cavern #44, Nanzuka, Tokyo, Japan
2023 Tout Suite, Almine Rech, Paris, France
2022 Woodz 'n Things, Totah, New York, NY, USA
2022 Bestest Ever, with Cosmic Cavern #42, Honor Fraser, Los Angeles, CA, USA
2022 New! Now! Good!, Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, South Korea
2021 Vaxi Nation, Almine Rech, Paris, France
2021 Earth, Almine Rech, Shanghai, China
2020 Dystopian Painting, Almine Rech, New York, NY, USA
2020 Moodz, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles and Miami, USA
2019 Optimistically Melting, Honor Fraser, Los Angeles, CA, USA
2019 Universalis, La Nave Salinas, Ibiza, Spain
2019 Blue Blood, Totah, New York, NY, USA
Selected Group Exhibitions
2025 My Amazing Friends, Deitch, New York, NY, USA
2025 Carnival, Deitch, New York, NY, USA
2024 The Art of the Oscar, Deitch, Los Angeles, CA, USA
2023 Beyond the Streets, London, United Kingdom, and Shanghai, China
2022 Basquiat Haring Scharf, Opera Gallery, Hong Kong
2022 Post Graffiti, Control Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, USA
2019 Beyond the Streets, Brooklyn, NY, USA
2018 Beyond the Streets, Los Angeles, CA, USA
2016 Desire, Gagosian and Deitch, Art Basel Miami Beach, FL, USA
2016 Masters: Urban and Street Art, Galerie Laurent Strouk, Paris, France
2013 Calligraffiti, Leila Heller Gallery, New York, NY, USA
1997 In Your Face: Haring, Basquiat & Scharf, Leo Malca Fine Art, New York, NY, USA
Museum and Institutional Exhibitions
2026 Emotional (solo), Hubei Modern Art Museum, Wuhan, China
2026 K & K, Nakamura Keith Haring Museum, Yamanashi, Japan
2026 Sea, Pop & Sun, Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles, France
2025 Emotional (solo), Modern Art Museum, Shanghai, China
2024 Kenny Scharf (solo), The Brant Foundation, New York, NY, USA
2023 Basquiat × Warhol: Painting Four Hands, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France
2023 Tempo. Tempo! Tempo?, Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg, Derneburg, Germany
2023 I'm Baaaack (solo), Sogetsu Museum, Tokyo, Japan
2022 Shapeshifters, Kunstlinie Almere Flevoland, Almere, Netherlands
2019 Happy, NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA
2018 Super Pop Universe (solo), Lotte Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea
2018 Under One Roof, Urban Nation Museum for Urban Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany
2018 Warhol & Friends: New York in the 80s, Palazzo Albergati, Bologna, Italy
2017 Fast Forward: Painting from the 1980s, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA
2017 Club 57: Film, Performance and Art in the East Village 1978–1983, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA
2016 Kenny Scharf (solo), Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, NY, USA
2016 Around the World in 86 Days, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany
2014 Urban Theater: New York Art in the 1980s, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX, USA
Biennials, Triennials and Art Fairs
2017 Bombay Beach Biennale, Salton Sea, CA, USA
2017 Frieze New York, Spotlight, New York, NY, USA
1985 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA
1984 Aperto 84, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy
1983 Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Selected Public Commissions and Projects
2018 Peanuts murals, worldwide
2018 Mural, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, MI, USA
2018 Mural, Freetown Christiania, Copenhagen, Denmark
2016 Lobby mural, Hammer Projects, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA
2015 Cosmic Cavern #33, Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR, USA
2015 Permanent mural, Malaga, Spain
2014 Cosmigogo, textile design, Louis Vuitton
2013 Tonywood, The Wynwood Walls Memorial Garden, Miami, FL, USA
Selected Public and Institutional Collections
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA
The Jewish Museum, New York, NY, USA
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, USA
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA
The Broad Foundation, Los Angeles, CA, USA
The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, CT, USA
The Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, FL, USA
Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL, USA
The Paterson Museum, Paterson, NJ, USA
New England Center for Contemporary Art, Brooklyn, CT, USA
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Groninger Museum, Groningen, Netherlands
Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico
Selected Publications and Monographs
2026 Kenny Scharf: Karbombz!. Beyond the Streets
2026 Kenny Scharf: Emotional. Modern Art Museum Shanghai
2021 Kenny Scharf: Moodz. JRP Editions
2015 Kenny Scharf: Born Again. Honor Fraser Gallery
2013 Kenny Scharf: Kolors. Paul Kasmin Gallery
1998 Kenny Scharf. Essays by Carter Ratcliff and Robert Farris Thompson, interview by Dennis Hopper. Tony Shafrazi Gallery
1997 Kenny Scharf: Pop Surrealist. Salvador Dalí Museum
1996 El Mundo de Kenny Scharf. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey