MADRID.- The image of Kenny Scharf (born Los Angeles, 1958) remains associated with his heyday in the 1980s in New York's East Village, where he was a friend and fellow-artist of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat and, like them, a protégé of Andy Warhol. Scharf, however, outlived those years and his Pop-surreal aesthetic has continued to evolve and reaffirm its connection to the present day. Aspects of that aesthetic have long been overlooked. The present exhibition at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza aims to show how, from the outset, Scharf has also been a painter of nature and one committed to raising awareness of the climate crisis. Those who know him as a radically urban artist, enamoured with plastic and television, will be surprised to discover a hymn to nature in his work. Trees, plants, forests, planets and molecular structures proliferate, creating a dizzying ecosystem that is permanently on the verge of chaos. Scharf’s garden at his Los Angeles home is beautiful, and his studio is filled with plants.
Kenny Scharf grew up in California's San Fernando Valley in the 1960s, before emissions controls were introduced: “I remember some days I could barely open my eyes and my lungs would hurt.” This motivated an ecological awareness that is always present in his work, as he explained in an interview published in Observer (11.08.2024): “If you really look at what’s going on in most of these paintings, I would say the essential theme connecting them is that however joyous, colourful, fun and celebratory the capitalistic, consumerist American way of life may seem, there will always be this elephant in the room, which is what it’s doing to the earth. We have created a monster that we choose to ignore and look the other way, thinking that it will disappear, when in fact, all my fears are coming true as we witness the destruction. It is not an existential threat anymore. It is happening before our eyes, yet most continue to pretend it’s not happening or just keep pushing it down as if it doesn’t matter.”
Nature in times of climate crisis
The exhibition is structured as four sections, which do not follow a chronological order but rather present four facets of Scharf’s work.
1. Landscapes
“I spent a lot of time in the forests, in the beach, just studying birds and trees and water”
Territories without a horizon, seen from within. Their origin lies in Brazil, where Scharf lived from 1983. The first room locates these forests between two specific disasters: the deforestation of the Amazon, of which Scharf has first-hand knowledge, and the California wildfires, which he watched burn from his bed in January 2025. It reveals a painting technique that mimics the processes of life: Scharf begins his backgrounds on the floor, pouring diluted acrylic paint and letting gravity do its work until the central puddle becomes a swirling vortex. He then applies spray paint, screen printing and oil paint on top. “The decoration comes from nature”, he explains; “we repeat its motifs”. The landscape here is not a background or a view, but an organism of which the viewer is already a part.
2. The tree as shaman
“Large trees always struck me as messengers from another time—beautiful beings, so stable and wise. Chopping them down feels like murder”
In the shamanic traditions of various cultures, the tree represents the central pillar of the cosmos, its roots, trunk and branches connecting earth and sky. Like human shamans, Scharf’s trees enter altered states to mediate between everyday reality and the spirit world. The four large paintings in this section feature a great, hyperactive and delirious tree that lives, dreams, sings and dances, sustaining an entire fantastical ecosystem around it, a jungle teeming with tiny creatures.
3. Cosmic visions
“Space is right here”
Circular figures proliferate in this section, evoking celestial bodies. There is no up or down in outer space; all things levitate and move ceaselessly. Scharf was born a year after Sputnik and witnessed the moon landing as a child. When that fantasy faded in the 1970s, he decided to continue it for himself: hence the starry backgrounds and vortices. But the room also reveals a shift in this iconography. With respect to the current billionaires’ space race, Scharf protests: “I don’t want to live on Mars. This is a great planet; let’s try to preserve it.” And he adds something that reorders his entire cosmology: “Space is right here. We are in space.” The cosmic vision ceases to be escapism and becomes scale: Earth seen as what it is, a small, unique body in the darkness.
4. A choir of voices
“I see faces in all of them”
Blobs or blobz constitute the most characteristic motif in Scharf's output: flexible, variable, fluid balloons with eyes and mouths that express emotions. Anticipating today's emoji language by decades, they gave rise to Scharf’s “Moodz”: tondos painted between 2018 and 2022, the years of the pandemic, in which no expression is ever repeated. The blobz form compact collectives; they appear tightly packed together, creating dense and dynamic compositions. “We are all here together, with different colours and shapes, occupying the same space”, in Scharf’s words. “It’s a kind of coexistence.” This is the meaning of the chorus of voices: trees, algae, animals, humans, planets and household appliances, dissolving the boundary between the human, the living and the thrown away. The response to the climate crisis is not despair but active hope: “Sometimes I want to warn that there's beauty but it's fucked. And sometimes I just want to say, you know what, I need joy right now. So I decide to celebrate.” Will we be able to save the planet? “Unfortunately, we seemed doomed a long time ago. But I've maintained hope in order to keep myself optimistic and alive. It's becoming harder and harder. I am most worried about the children,” Scharf says.
Biography
Kenny Scharf grew up in California's San Fernando Valley surrounded by tv Pop culture, Googie architecture and the technological optimism of the Space Age. In 1978 he moved to New York to study at the School of Visual Arts, meeting Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat there just a few days later. The three of them were part of the core of the East Village scene, where Scharf exhibited at Patti Astor's Fun Gallery alongside Fab Five Freddy, Futura 2000, and Lady Pink.
In 1981, in the cupboard of the house where he lived near Times Square, he built the first Cosmic Cavern: an immersive environment made from plastic rubbish painted in fluorescent colours under black light. Since then, Scharf has recreated these caves in museums, nightclubs and art fairs around the world. Andy Warhol, whom he met during those years, was his mentor and supporter. Represented by the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Scharf achieved international recognition with his participation in the 1985 Whitney Biennial, where he presented When the Worlds Collide (1984), now in the collection of the Whitney Museum.
In 1983 he married Brazilian Tereza Gonçalves and spent long periods in Brazil, a pivotal experience for his relationship with nature and for the ecological shift in his painting. He currently divides his time between Brazil and his hometown of Los Angeles.
Scharf's work encompasses painting, sculpture, installation, public murals (which he creates free of charge), customised appliances and cars, animation and design, all driven by a constant conviction: that art belongs to everyone. He participated in Art in the Streets (MOCA, Los Angeles, 2011) and has been the subject of extensive retrospectives at the Brant Foundation (2024) and at the Shanghai Modern Art Museum (Emotional, 2025). He is represented in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, The Broad in Los Angeles, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro, among others.
