For Hodgepodge, Scharf has created several new bodies of work that survey his particular aesthetic approaches and sensibilities. The show features paintings, sculptures, a Cosmic Cavern installation, and a customized Cadillac. To help christen Scharf's new customized Cadillac sculpture, The New and Improved Ultima Suprema Deluxa, Magnuson will interact with the piece in a manner reminiscent of the 1960s Cadillac girls - glamorized beauties who elegantly showcased the cars - but reinvented through a psychedelic, free-associative mon... Read more

For Hodgepodge, Scharf has created several new bodies of work that survey his particular aesthetic approaches and sensibilities. The show features paintings, sculptures, a Cosmic Cavern installation, and a customized Cadillac. To help christen Scharf’s new customized Cadillac sculpture, The New and Improved Ultima Suprema Deluxa, Magnuson will interact with the piece in a manner reminiscent of the 1960s Cadillac girls – glamorized beauties who elegantly showcased the cars – but reinvented through a psychedelic, free-associative monologue that will combine vintage ad copy with Beat poetry. The car has been painted in a hybrid of sea and powder blue, with a band of space creatures having taken hold, including some oft-appropriated characters from The Jetsons cartoon series. This historic symbol of luxury and progress has been turned into a vehicle in which to ride out the Apocalypse in style as it crashes into another sculpture, Picnicaboom (2012), a “picnic table” of sorts with an atomic mushroom cloud cum umbrella exploding from it. Like much of Scharf’s work, these pieces take on notions of creation and destruction, acting out an eternal struggle between the natural and the man-made.

Scharf currently lives and works in New York, Los Angeles, and Brazil. His work can be found in major museums and collections, including the Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Eli Broad Foundation, MOCA Los Angeles and the Stedelijik Museum. In 2009, a comprehensive catalog of his work was authored by art historian Richard Marshall and published by Rizzoli. Most recently, in 2011, Scharf’s work was featured in the MOCA LA’s Art in the Streets exhibition. Recent exhibitions were presented at Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York (2011), and The Hole, New York (2010).

FINISM: A performance by Ann Magnuson

A key member of the New York downtown scene in the 1980s, Magnuson once worked as the influential manager of Club 57, where she organized countless performances, poetry readings, parties, plays, and exhibitions with fellow artists Tseng Kwong Chi, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Wendy Wild to name a few. The title Finism comes out of a shared philosophy that Scharf and Magnuson developed early on in their partnership, leading Magnuson to establish this new kind of art world “–ism”. Born out of the ever-looming threat of nuclear war, Finism embraces the apocalypse. If the end is near, why not celebrate? Think “Fin” at the end of a French film, but in crazy cartoon colors. Also consider another kind of “fin”: the tailfins on early Cadillacs such as the one used for Scharf’s sculpture. The tailfin was an element of flair added to the design of these cars in order to conceal the gas cap, which was considered to be an eye sore. It embellishes a practicality, turning it into something to enjoy. Like the tailfins on early Cadillacs, Finism is an ode to the good ole days and all that they promised for the future.

Ann Magnuson is a Los Angeles based actress, singer, writer and performance artist. She has performed at the Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, BAM, LACMA, REDCAT, The Andy Warhol Museum, SFMOMA and in places as far flung as Tokyo and Sweden’s Ice Hotel in the Arctic Circle. She has also curated exhibitions in New York City and Los Angeles. Recently Magnuson has been touring with her new cabaret show, “Drawing Room Apocalypse.”