Artist Kenny Scharf: ‘I’m carrying the torch for friends who couldn’t keep it going’

In the mid-1980s, Kenny Scharf biked from his Queens studio to his East Village apartment every night at around 3am. The ungodly hour would allow the young artist to “bomb” the walls of Manhattan’s east side with his energetic cartoonish figures. He had grown up making oil paintings outside Los Angeles, but upon moving to New York at age 19, he was fascinated by the graffiti all across the subway. Keith Haring – his roommate at the time – encouraged him to paint outside. “I immediately grabbed a spray can and learned how to make a painting on the run,” says Scharf. Four decades later, the tireless painter of harmonically chaotic street art-infused dreamscapes opens his very first institutional show at the Brant Foundation in the East Village. Scharf relocated to LA more than two decades ago, and the self-titled outing marks his return to his stomping grounds where he rose to fame along with Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. About 70 paintings and a few sculptures trace the 66-year-old’s lustrous career of many highs and comebacks. After a 1995-dated exhibition which started at Marco in Monterrey, Mexico, failed to tour, he – unlike his peers – never received a career-defining...