Meridians Art Basel Miami Beach

In the Meridians Sector, Almine Rech is pleased to present a historical work by Kenny Scharf (b. 1958, Los Angeles) created in Belgium in 1994. This large-scale spray painting on wood measuring nearly seven meters in length is executed in the spontaneous and playful style associated with wall graffiti.

Approximating a mural in size and appearance, Kenny Scharf’s Untitled is a prime example of the artist’s stylized graffiti vocabulary. Together with his close friends Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, Scharf played a key role in reviving the New York art scene in the early 1980s. ‘Street Art’ is a name recently given to their practice, but the idea behind it was to make art more accessible to a wide public. It was during this time that Scharf was included in the 1985 Whitney Biennial, which marked the beginning of his international acclaim.

References to popular culture as well as imagined anthropomorphic creatures reoccur throughout his works. His compositions are dynamic deconstructions of artistic hierarchies, echoing the philosophy of Pop artists. Scharf describes his practice: ‘Surrealism is about the unconscious.... The images come from the unconscious except that my unconscious is filled with pop imagery. My unconscious is pop, so therefore the art would be Pop-Surrealism.’

Kenny Scharf
Booth M11

In the Meridians Sector, Almine Rech and David Castillo are pleased to present a joint presentation of Rover by Vaughn Spann (b. 1992, Orlando, Florida).

Vaughn Spann's powerfully evocative paintings synthesize abstract textures and forms into compositions charged by familiar symbols and their changing connotations. Spann reconfigures our relationships to various motifs and archetypes - rainbows, the X, flags, and others - suggestive of the fraught and violent social realities that underlie life.

Here he presents a monumental work from his 'Dalmatian' series - the first created at this immense scale. Bearing patterns that hint at the dog's spotted coat, the work alludes to the artist's childhood aspirations of the American ideal as modeled by family sitcoms and movies. For the artist at young age, the fictional households that kept Dalmatians as pets represented an economic and racial fantasy. Spann examines such socioeconomic signifiers of the American Dream and the racial divides they present.

Vaughn Spann
Booth M2