Beschreibung:

KENNY SCHARF (B. 1958)City of the Future 2005 oil on canvas in artist's frame unframed: 108 by 150 in.; 274.3 by 381 cm. framed: 119 by 161 in.; 302.3 by 408.9 cm. This work was executed in 2005.FootnotesProvenance Kevin Bruk Gallery, Miami Private Collection, New York Acquired directly from the above by the present owner Exhibited Santa Monica, Patrick Painter Gallery, Kenny Scharf Outer Limits, 2005 Undoubtedly the largest and most ambitious painting by Kenny Scharf to ever be offered at auction, City of the Future (2005) is a monumental, museum-quality work by one of America's most iconic artists. An ascendant star of the Downtown Street Art scene of 1980s New York alongside Keith Haring and Jean-Michel-Basquiat, Scharf's enduring influence on global artists spanning media and genres including Neo-Pop, graffiti and Comic Abstraction has been profound and evident in the careers of George Condo KAWS and Takeshi Murakami, to name but a few. Scharf's brand of Pop Surrealism – a term coined by the artist – is completely unique, and no better utopic vision exists of Scharf's artistic universe than in the present work. An exceptional opportunity to acquire a staggering and emphatic work by Scharf, resplendent in an artist's frame that is unique to the painting, City of the Future has all the hallmarks of an iconic piece by an artist whose career is synonymous with 1980s New York and continues to be championed as a leading painter of his generation. Born in Los Angeles in 1958, Scharf moved to New York City in 1979, inspired by Andy Warhol's work that Scharf felt had opened the field to a new kind of experimentation and timbre – a precocity and amusement that went starkly against the academic tendencies of late Modernist abstraction, Minimalism and Conceptualism. In Scharf's nascent practice there emerged a zealous employment of color and style, synthesizing an assortment of anthropomorphic characters that became the artist's lifelong cast. Nodding to early 1960s comics and television cartoons, the influence of 'The Flintstones' and 'The Jetsons' was immediately apparent in his early work. Hosting parties with Keith Haring – whom he shared an apartment with at the time in 1980 and 1981 – Scharf took his art to the walls of Manhattan, assembling his Cosmic Caverns with Day-Glo and UV paints that formed the settings for the disco parties that are practically coupled with the legacy of the East Village art scene. In 1981, Scharf had his first solo exhibition with FUN Gallery – a space that Scharf not only inaugurated with his show, but he is also credited with naming. Opened on East 11th Street by underground actress Patti Astor, FUN Gallery was one of the most important spaces in the Village scene that helped launch the careers of Fab 5 Freddy, Futura 2000 and Keith Haring as well as showing Jean-Michel-Basquiat in 1982. Reminiscing about the cauldron of creativity that was the East Village in the early 1980s, Rene Ricard commented "the excitement [...] is that we've seen it here before the media killed the fun. [...] When I look back at the 1980s what I'll remember as the high point is Kenny Scharf's opening a few weeks ago at Patti Astor's FUN Gallery" (Rene Ricard quoted in Jay Gorney, The East Village, Latest Lure for the Art World, The Washington Post, 12 February 1984, online). Deeply embedded and one of the central protagonists of this circle, Scharf epitomizes the vibrancy of the New York Avant-Garde that instantly drew the attention of Diego Cortez, Jeffrey Deitch and Bruno Bischofberger, who attended FUN Gallery to get access to the ascendant stars of the New Wave and Punk movements. His breakthrough inclusion in the Whitney Biennial in 1985 was the institutional watershed for Scharf, and his career truly took off in earnest, with global exhibitions following at Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich, and Akira Ikeda Gallery, Tokyo. Scharf's relationship to the cosmic, the utopic, and the hyperreal worlds of graffiti and c