Kenny Scharf "Barberadise" Exhibition Recap

Honor Fraser proudly presented an exhibition of new works by Kenny Scharf over the weekend. The exhibition, entitled Barberadise, showcased new paintings that integrate familiar icons from Scharf’s visual lexicon and implies a utopian world that is at once nostalgically comic and vibrantly cosmic. However, even in this utopia everything is still tinged with the subversive undertone of the disarray that was left behind.

In Barberadise, Scharf combines silkscreen, glitter, oil, spray paint and acrylic paint to invigorate a cast of familiar characters and to flesh out some new ones. He features the Flintstones and the Jetsons careening in the cosmos, exuberant donuts floating in space, fantastical amorphic blobs, and vibrant topographical jungle paintings. Scharf also plays with found newspaper texts that are translated into screened words on canvas. In a number of new works he uses texts from1950s newspapers that were found stuffed in an old sofa. The words evoke a time of nuclear proliferation and political strife. These headlines are eerily current, reflecting similar headlines in today’s papers.

The exhibition runs through October 31st, 2009.

Source: Arrested Motion