Kenny Scharf, born in 1958 in California, participated in the East Village art scene during the 1980s. A friend of Andy Warhol, Klaus Nomi and Ann Magnuson, Scharf was one of the leading figures of Club 57, while, along with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, he contributed to the redefinition of painting through the use of a painterly language influenced by street art and 80’s pop aesthetics.
Having worked with different kinds of media, ranging from painting to installation art, Kenny Scharf developed a visual language based on vivid “candy” colors, and invented a symbolic universe inhabited by his own cartoon characters that were inspired by the heroes of the TV series “The Flintstones” and “The Jetsons” that he used to watch as a child. Scharf's characters seem to adopt a rather critical stance towards the ideals of modernist painting. They keep sprouting up through biomorphic shapes on the surface of the canvas, or on the walls of buildings, and they even take a three-dimensional form on Scharf’s sculptures…always in a playful mood to disrupt reality and “break the rules, if any.”
