Kenny Scharf

Los Angeles-based artist Kenny Scharf is best known for his association with the 1980s East Village art community in downtown New York. Scharf was one of the pioneers of contemporary Street Art alongside contemporaries like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. With work spanning painting, sculpture, installation, murals, performance, and fashion design, Scharf employs a range of techniques and media to create hallucinatory worlds filled with cartoon characters and brightly colored anthropomorphic blobs. Drawing from 1960s American cartoons such as The Jetsons and The Flintstones, Scharf’s work features a recurring cast of original characters—curvaceous, wide-eyed, and often zooming through the air. As part of the first generation to grow up with television, Scharf is drawn to the ability of pop cultural imagery—particularly cartoon characters—to captivate viewers from all walks of life. His dynamic, hyper-saturated compositions merge his interests in science fiction, comic books, and popular culture with the traditions of Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, and Street Art. Scharf describes himself as a “Pop Surrealist'' for the ways his work deconstructs hierarchies between “high” and “low” art and places emphasis on the importance of combining serious artistic inquiry with play in order to highlight the creative process and appeal to wide audiences.

Scharf is drawn to the ability of pop cultural imagery—particularly cartoon characters—to captivate viewers from all walks of life.

Influenced by growing up near Disneyland on a diet of cartoons and sitcoms, Scharf’s Luna Luna commission comprised a swing ride made up of panels graffitied with playful geometric shapes and his signature cartoon figures. Audience members were suspended from the rotating top of the ride, where they enjoyed views of the grounds and of Scharf's free-standing sculptures that beckoned visitors like carnival barkers.