Kenny Scharf - New Now New York Wednesday, September 27, 2023 | Phillips

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  • A rainbow of amoebic shapes squirm across the surface of Kenny Scharf’s Curvabolatrap, 1987, executed two years after the artist’s landmark installation at the Whitney Biennial. The work, with its psychedelic sense of color and nonsensical title, speaks to the playful energy of the East Village art scene in the 1970s and 1980s, of which Scharf was a key member. Like his contemporaries and close friends, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Scharf leverages the exuberance and spontaneity of street art across his practice. In Curvabolatrap, Scharf’s curved shapes seem to swell to the edges of the relatively conventional, rectangular canvas, as if the energy of his imagination is about to spill onto the gallery floor and into the street.

     

    “A Surrealist is using imagery from the subconscious, or dream imagery. My subconscious is full of popular imagery. I was growing up in the television age and barraged with the media.”
    —Kenny Scharf

    Scharf is a self-described “pop surrealist,” intuitive and inventive, with a subconscious “full of popular imagery.”i Early works by the artist, such as Love, 1982, feature recognizable characters from cartoons that the artist watched growing up, such as The Flintstones and The Jetsons. In the mid-1980s, however, Scharf shifted from cartoon characters to creatures of his own creation, albeit with a visual influence connected to the simplified, dynamic draftsmanship of cartoons and comic books. He emphasized the importance of shape and gesture in a 1985 interview, saying, “if my figures didn’t have eyeballs and mouths, they’d be abstract paintings.”ii

     

    Yves Tanguy, The Look of Amber, 1929. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Image: © National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Chester Dale Fund, 1984.75.1, Artwork: © 2023 Estate of Yves Tanguy / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

    Curvabolatrap, thus, speaks to the more abstract edge of Scharf’s painting practice. While tiny stick figures rendered in black paint occupy the only slivers of negative space in the work serve more as visual markers of the inflatable scale of the curving shapes, rather than major characters in a cartoon landscape. This treatment recalls the Surrealists’ play with optics and scale in their work, with tiny figures or shapes often used to illustrate the towering monstrosity of the rest of the painted vision, as exemplified in the haunting, fantastic dreamscapes of Yves Tanguy. Tanguy’s amorphous, floating shapes can be seen as the Surrealist ancestors to Scharf’s Curvabolatrap; as Scharf himself explains, Tanguy’s “forms in the landscapes connected with me at a very deep level. I love to see something that looks real and that you can touch and feel and yet is completely from the imagination.”iii

     

    The bulbous, bright shapes of Curvabolatrap further recall graffiti letters which, abstracted beyond legibility, can become more design than text. Scharf leverages cartoon and street art techniques of simplified forms and straightforward shading to create volume within the frieze-like space of Curvabolatrap; the interlocking shapes read even like a psychedelic, horizontal game of Tetris. Curvabolatrap is both playful and dynamic; self-aware, decorative, and indicative of a rich imagination shimmering just below the surface.

     

     

    i Kenny Scharf, quoted in Karin Lipson, “Pop Surrealism, With a Dash of Trash, Disco and Fluorescent Paint,” The New York Times, Jul. 1, 2016, online; Scharf, interviewed by Keith Haring, FlashArt, January 1985, online.

    ii Scharf, quoted in Steven Hager, “Mutants from Outer Space,” High Times, Feb. 1985, online.

    iii Scharf, quoted in Emily Gonzalez-Jarrett, “Kenny Scharf,” Hammer Museum, 2015, online.

    • Provenance

      Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York
      Private Collection (acquired from the above)
      Christie's, New York, November 16, 2006, lot 445
      Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

    • Literature

      Richard Marshall, Carlo McCormick and Ann Magnuson, Kenny Scharf, New York, 2009, pp. 130–131 (illustrated)

44

Curvabolatrap

signed, titled and dated "Kenny Scharf 86-7 Curvabolatrap" on the reverse
oil on canvas, in artist's frame
46 x 96 in. (116.8 x 243.8 cm)
Painted in 1986–1987.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$200,000 - 300,000 

Sold for $247,650

Contact Specialist

Avery Semjen
Associate Specialist, Head of New Now Sale 
T +1 212 940 1207
asemjen@phillips.com

New Now

New York Auction 27 September 2023