PAUL KASMIN GALLERY PRESENTS KENNY SCHARF’S
SUPERPOP & CLOSET #24
NEW PAINTINGS AND BLACK LIGHT INSTALLATION

October 14 – November 12, 2005 Public Opening Friday, October 14, 6 – 8 pm

August 25, 2005, New York, NY: In his first exhibition at Paul Kasmin Gallery, and his first major show in New York since 2001, Kenny Scharf will debut all new paintings in Superpop, at 293 Tenth Avenue, along with Closet #24, a site-specific black light installation in the gallery’s 511 W. 27th St. exhibition space. Both installations open October 14, 2005.

Scharf has always been a jester known for his fantasy worlds of both fun and crazed, familiar and invented cartoon characters, and jungles of googly-eyed faces and bulging, molecular shapes. Scharf’s alien landscapes are often interspersed with stylistic nods and direct references to Dalí, Tanguy, Ernst and de Chirico. He attributes these signature alternative realities to growing up in the TV generation. “I’m switching channels all the time. I go from cartoons to news to soaps and on and on. Sometimes I go back to channels that I painted 10-15 years earlier, revisiting a great show and creating new, more exciting episodes,” the artist said recently.

Superpop harkens back to a channel Scharf has surfed several times before, the pastiche format sprinkled with idioms of late 20th century consumer culture. Home-cooked meatloaf, Carnation condensed milk and madras patterns reference a mom and pop America where dinner happens at 6 on a picnic table motif and blond babies, Chevys and donuts abound. Like much of Scharf’s work, these seemingly upbeat paintings are peppered with dark hints of innocence run amok.

“I love the imagery of American culture and am seduced by it but I feel that it is destroying our world with consumer madness,” Scharf says. “My work is often about the American way of life that we are in and continuing despite the doomsday scenario

Scharf lures us into his latest work with familiar and stylized commercial imagery (primarily from 1958-63), brazen pitches from the classifieds like “Special,” “Fast!” and “Now!,” and cocktails on trays inviting us to toast the corrupt American Way. All the while, he blends these coded political statements with tributes to pillars in 20th century contemporary art. These new paintings reference Pollock’s boundless “all overness,” Rauschenberg’s layered silk-screened backgrounds and assemblage with “junk” (Closet #24). Scharf touches on Rosenquist with deft painting of pop detritus and conjures Warhol directly with the Campbell’s soup can. Like a Dada poem, in Superpop Scharf layers his influences on all levels, from artistic to childhood to contemporary magazine and newspaper clippings, and binds them together.

Scharf’s black light installation, Closet #24, located at 511 W. 27th Street, will run concurrent with Superpop. The 24th of the artist’s site-specific installations will, like the others, feature a rat’s nest of junk including toys, appliances, plastic, lights, and cardboard. 90 percent of the junk is found, much is reused over the years and all of it is painted florescent to glow beneath black light. The organic den is essentially escapist though it is made with the detritus of everything around us–another indictment of consumer culture. Closet # 24 will be made onsite the week prior to opening on October 14, 2005 and open for viewing Wednesday – Saturday, 12 – 6 pm.

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

Gallery Hours: 293 Tenth Avenue: Tuesday - Saturday, 10am - 6pm.
511 West 27th Street: Wednesday - Saturday, 12pm - 6pm.

NEXT: New paintings and photographs by James Nares on view November 17 – December 23.

MEDIA CONTACT: Sarah Hogate Bacon, 718 755 3618 /[email protected]
GALLERY CONTACT: Varick Shute, 212 563 4474 / [email protected]