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“I embrace art that doesn’t require permission. The thing that I love about it is that it needs to get out, and it will get out. I think art is out of control. Art should be out of control.” —Kenny Scharf
Although most commonly identified as a street artist, in the last four decades Kenny Scharf (b. 1958, Los Angeles) has maintained one of the more diverse careers of any artist of his generation. Next week, Scharf will be opening his first solo show at Totah gallery in New York, blue blood. Running May 2 through July 28, 2019, the exhibition will include new paintings as well as a black-lit installation in the gallery’s lower level that references his historical connection with the East Village of the 1980s.
Scharf attended Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts and came of age in the 1980s New York downtown art scene alongside contemporaries Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and others. 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 – working under the term he coined “pop surrealism.” Many of his larger works still adorn New York streets to this day.
For this video from Movies On Artists, filmmaker Niko Hronopoulos visited Scharf as he painted in the Boneyard Project in Arizona, and in his studio in Los Angeles.
