Kenny Scharf: MOODZ

About

The exhibition will be viewed by appointment only.

Visitors to Jeffrey Deitch’s Los Angeles gallery this summer will confront an astonishing sight: two hundred-fifty of Kenny Scharf's circular paintings of faces, every one of them different. He has been working on this project for months, painting several faces a day. He thinks of his paintings as being like people: no two are alike.

Kenny Scharf has been spray-painting faces since 1981. Furtively painting on the street, he learned to develop images spontaneously and quickly. His faces project involves intense focus. He has created an expansive body of work within a rigorous set of constraints - but with infinite possibilities.

Who are the characters depicted on Scharf’s multiple canvases? He explains that they all reflect aspects of his own personality. Some days he needs to release his aggressive energy and they may reflect his anger. Other faces reflect his exuberance and love of painting.

Scharf embraces the immediacy of spray paint. His gestures use his entire body. The process is totally physical, like a dance. He paints while listening to music on his headphones, entering into a zone where his mind and body merge. His strokes follow the beat.

Spray painting is probably the most direct way to make an image. There is no possibility of correction or erasing. As Scharf says, “there is no lying with spray paint.” The accidents that happen lead to new ideas. His faces are continually morphing and evolving.

The serial imagery and the iconic quality of Scharf’s faces evokes the work of Andy Warhol. The conceptual structure also reflects the heritage of Sol LeWitt. Scharf likens the multiple colored images on the wall to his early memory seeing the pixels of color on his parents’ first color television. His work fuses the vocabulary of Pop Art and Minimalism with the 1960s California TV culture that he experienced as a boy in the San Fernando Valley and as a high school student in Beverly Hills. He characterizes his approach to art as psychedelic conceptualism.

Kenny Scharf is one of the quintessential Los Angeles artists of his generation, but because of his celebrated history in New York and his association with his colleagues Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, it is only recently that he is no longer seen as an outsider in his own city. For twenty years he has been making his mark on Los Angeles with remarkable public projects like his free Karbombz!, now numbering 256 cars, visible every day on the freeways. A Los Angeles Karbombz! rally is planned for Saturday, September 26.

Jeffrey Deitch has been presenting public art and gallery projects with Kenny Scharf for many years including murals on the West Hollywood Public Library parking garage, the famous mural at the entrance to Wynwood Walls in Miami and Inner and Outer Space, presented in 2017 at his New York gallery. An earlier version of the face painting exhibition was presented by Lio Malca in Ibiza in the summer of 2019.