LOTTE MUSEUM OF ART - LMOA

LOTTE Museum of Art presents an exhibition of Kenny Scharf, a living legend of Pop Art whose ingenious works incorporate social messages through animated characters in science fiction settings, as inspired by the fast-growing pop culture of 1970s New York. It is the first-ever grand-scale exhibition to feature over 100 works by Kenny Scharf, including his paintings, sculptures, drawings and videos. Scharf, along with other artists such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, helped cement the Golden Age of 1970s Pop Art Movement, a concept introduced by Andy Warhol a decade earlier. The current exhibition is an opportunity to experience anew the beginning of a new artistic era from 1970s in which the art stepped down from its elitism and started mingling with ordinary life.

After moving to New York from L.A. in 1978, Scharf attended the School of Visual Arts where he met his roommate Haring and Basquiat. The trio would hang out together in the streets of East Village, painting graffiti on the streets, meeting Andy Warhol and venturing into experimental performance art at Club 57. Soon thereafter, these young artists made a grand debut into the New York art scene and became a new focus of attention from the international art community.

Specially featured in this exhibition are The Jetstons series, Cosmic Cavern, and other major works by Scharf that reflect his perspective on the world. Scharf’s artistic vision was heavily influenced by animated cartoons he watched as a young boy on color television (a new invention at the time). One such cartoon, the Flintstones, is a story involving a family in the stone age, while the aforementioned the Jetsons is set in the futuristic space age. Using these shows as a medium, Scharf combines the two cartoons to create a new story titled the Jetstones. The widespread fear of war, drugs, and AIDS that plagued society since the late 1970s is manifested through the themes of nuclear holocaust and environmental problems in Scharf’s works. Underlying the Jetstones is a social anxiety pertaining to these issues and a desire to escape from the post-apocalyptic earth to the outer space. The animated characters in the story are juxtaposed with fin-de-siècle social problems, creating a new metaphor. His apocalyptic perspective can also be found in Cosmic Cavern: the colorful, fluorescent environment built with abandoned toys and electronics symbolizes an escape from the fear of reality into a safer space. Furthermore, it underscores a metamorphosis of life’s bleakness into a world distinctly Scharf’s own, its vibrant colors and moving forms percolating with humor and positive energy.

Kenny Scharf turns the mundanity of everyday life into a marvelous playground. He can breathe new life into detritus just as effortlessly as he can create a new artwork out of random cars on the street by merely painting on them. An ordinary donut becomes a spaceship heading for utopia. The anxieties over war and the environment are amplified through caricature and humor. Interconnected in his work are visions of the past, the present and the future, inducing us to confront the social issues of the present. This exhibition will re-examine Scharf’s unique worldview in the larger context of visual culture and Pop Art, and provide viewers with a magical experience in which art transforms life, and reality melds into fantasy.