Kenny Scharf at Honor Fraser Gallery

On view: September 7–December 14, 2019

You may have seen his ecstatic swirling cartoons plastered across the side of a tire shop, or even gracing the side of a Honda Civic driving next to you on the 10. Kenny Scharf is an L.A. mainstay with an iconic style. In addition to his blob characters, Scharf incorporates found plastic toys, which at Honor Fraser he strings across the gallery entrance, in order to repurpose them out of the landfill. Despite his over-the-top aesthetic, Scharf’s new body of work has a darker undertone, and speaks to environmental collapse. In some paintings, his ecstatic blobs begin to melt across the canvas, and other works contain literal news headlines reporting on global warming. The title, Optimistically Melting!, gets at the conflict of our present day, which is how to stay optimistic and exuberant amidst the onslaught of environmental collapse.