Kenny Scharf

Kenny Scharf is enjoying life as best he can. He’s keenly aware of the charmed perch on which he is situated—professionally, as a pioneering artist that’s been celebrated for four decades, and personally, as a family-oriented patriarch, an offkilter personality, and one of the few still standing from his moment of comeuppance in 1980s downtown New York.

Concurrently, and unlike so many of us living today who as a means of survival block out our planet’s abundance of ongoing macro-level destructions, Scharf ponders daily the unfortunate state of the world and its likelihood of getting much worse rather than better.

Though living within this duality is a shared human experience of present day, it’s a topic that seems to get swept under the rug, as though ignoring it for long enough will make it all go away. Maybe we simply don’t have the language to discuss such an unthinkable roadmap or perhaps knowing our less-than-ideal fate, we focus on the daily pleasures of our finite lives.

– Maria Vogel, writer and art critic