Kaos,

Kenny Scharf (b. 1958, Los Angeles) emerged as a defining figure of New York’s downtown art scene in the early 1980s, alongside contemporaries including Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. After graduating from the School of Visual Arts in 1980, Scharf developed an instantly recognizable visual language that brought together graffiti, cartoons, science fiction, Pop Art and the energy of street culture. He deliberately moved between the street, nightlife and the gallery, using spray paint alongside traditional painting materials and creating his celebrated immersive “Cosmic Cavern” environments. By 1983, Scharf was exhibiting with the influential Tony Shafrazi Gallery, and his growing institutional recognition culminated in his inclusion in the 1985 Whitney Biennial. His work is now represented in major collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Kaos, 1983 is an especially characteristic early work, dating from the pivotal period when Scharf’s downtown vocabulary was taking shape. Executed in acrylic and spray paint on canvas, the 22 × 30-inch painting combines vivid primary colors, frenetic lines, spirals, starbursts and Scharf’s animated, cartoon-like creatures in a densely layered composition that lives up to its title. The collision of playful imagery with an almost overwhelming visual intensity is central to Scharf’s work: beneath its humor and exuberance lies a world informed by mass media, consumer culture and science-fiction fantasy. The use of spray paint is particularly evocative of Scharf’s early-1980s practice, when he was simultaneously working on the streets and exhibiting in galleries, deliberately erasing distinctions between graffiti culture and fine art. Signed, dated and titled, Kaos captures Scharf at an important moment in 1983, just as the visual language that would define his career was becoming established.