Kenny Scharf

Private Collection

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Los Angeles, Jeffrey Deitch, Kenny Scharf: MOODZ, November-December 2020, p. 81, illustrated

Kenny Scharf's imaginative murals, paintings, sculptures, and installations are filled with vibrant, whimsical faces and fantastical creatures. In Heye Guys, these characters interact with a galactic backdrop, creating a visually dynamic and surreal experience.

Scharf's diverse artistic journey originated in street art and graffiti and has evolved to encompass various mediums such as painting, sculpture, performance, and fashion. He characterizes his distinctive style as 'pop surrealism,' which combines vibrant colors, bold imagery, and elements of pop culture, dystopia, and science fiction. The serial imagery and the iconic quality depicted in Scharf’s faces evoke the contemporary version of Andy Warhol, fusing the vocabulary of Pop and Minimalism with 1960s California TV culture. 

As part of Scharf’s acclaimed MOODZ series, the present work was exhibited alongside approximately 350 other tondo face paintings at Jeffrey Deitch’s Los Angeles gallery in 2020. Collectively, the multitude of faces gave form to a population of moods, feelings, expressions, and colors. But close meditation on the single face of Heye Guys, with its bulbous nose, bulging eyes and off-centered grin, engenders a semblance of kinship between the viewer and the laughing face that cannot help but to brighten one’s day.  

Scharf’s work has been exhibited widely, including the Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg; Biennale de Sao Paolo, Brazil; Queens Museum of Art, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Portland Art Museum; and the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale.  His work belongs in the collections of The Bass, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Stedelijk Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others.