Kenny Scharf

American · b. 1958

Kenny Scharf is a key figure in the New York downtown art scene of the early 1980s, a peer and collaborator of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and one of the artists who brought street-level energy, pop culture obsession, and psychedelic exuberance into the mainstream gallery world.

Born in Los Angeles, Scharf studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he met Haring and was drawn into the overlapping worlds of Club 57, the East Village gallery scene, and the broader explosion of art-making that characterized New York in the early Reagan era. His work fused the cartoon vocabulary of Hanna-Barbera and The Jetsons with a cosmic, fluorescent sensibility shaped equally by science fiction, Pop Art, and a gleeful disregard for the boundaries between high and low culture.

The Work

Scharf’s paintings and prints are densely populated with invented creatures — bug-eyed, tentacled, radioactive — living in futures that look simultaneously utopian and dystopian. They are made with evident joy and technical craft, and they have aged well: the ecological anxieties embedded in his work from the beginning have only become more resonant.

He is also known for his transformed objects — household appliances, televisions, and furniture encrusted with resin, paint, and found objects — and for his large-scale immersive installations. His prints are among the most lively and collectible multiples from the downtown New York generation.

Legacy

Scharf’s work is held in major institutional collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. His association with Haring and Basquiat has kept him central to the historical narrative of 1980s New York.