David Klein Gallery

Kenny Scharf is widely known for his pop culture murals, paintings, sculpture, and installations. Scharf considers himself a “Pop Surrealist”. As Scharf states: In the early 1980’s, Scharf was a prominent member of the East Village art scene along with his friends and contemporaries Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Scharf participated in many significant exhibitions in New York at that time including the Times Square Show, Club 57 at Club 57, the Open Studio Show at P.S.1 and the 1985 Whitney Biennial. Most recently, Scharf was included in Club 57: Film, Performance and Art in the East Village, 1978-1983 at the Museum of Modern Art and Fast Forward: Paintings from the 1980’s at the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York, NY. His murals can be found in multiple cities in the U.S. and abroad, including Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY; Wynwood, FL; Careyes, Mexico; Paris, France; Sao Paulo, Brazil; and Malaga, Spain. Scharf’s Detroit exhibition will feature a number of seminal works including Handy Andy, 2008, Bearjungle, 2010, and Probz, 2018. As a child growing up in 1950s and 60s, Scharf was intrigued and inspired by popular TV culture, especially the saturated color and imagery of daytime cartoons like The Jetsons and The Flintstones. These characters and the wildly imaginative landscapes they inhabit have had a profound influence on Scharf’s work. The cartoons’ playfulness and sunny optimism continue to a provide a foundation for his best work.

Recovery features silverpoint drawings of significant African-American artists, writers, musicians and revolutionaries at rest or enjoying a leisurely activity. Moore, who often paints on copper panels, presents a group of intimately sized portraits of close friends as well as a self-portrait. A focal point of the show is a large-scale oil on canvas titled A Student’s Dream, which depicts Moore lying on a table in what appears to be an early operating theater. The painting is a reference to Moore’s recent awake craniotomy, a surgery he underwent to remove a benign brain tumor. Also included in the exhibition are two recent videos: I Wish It Was Mine and Sorry for the Interruption, produced during Moore’s 2017 residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. After enduring his own physical trauma and surgery, Moore sought to examine the nature of recovery from trauma and stress and how it is experienced by black men in our contemporary society. He states: “The process of recovery is imperative for a body that has endured a certain trauma or physical strain. Yet, In America, there is an expectation for Black men to perpetually prevail—to keep working, keep fighting, and deny the body rest – despite the pains they may endure. Throughout history, Black men in America have been bombarded with endless conflict against their minds and bodies, rarely ever having opportunity to consider self-care.” Mario Moore, was born and raised in Detroit. He holds a BFA from College for Creative Studies, Detroit and an MFA from Yale, New Haven, CT. His work is in numerous private and public collections including the Detroit Institute of Arts, Winston-Salem State University and Knox College. He was recently awarded the prestigious Hodder Fellowship by Princeton University.

A sixth-generation Detroiter, Hocking is descended from generations of Baltic Polish immigrants and Cornish copper miners who settled in the Upper Peninsula’s Copper Harbor. Hocking states: “The idea of copper mining being a huge part of my family history connected to an overall theme for me. Copper mining in the Upper Peninsula has been going on for thousands of years. The earliest natives living in this region around the Great Lakes were classified as the Old Copper Complex and copper artifacts from this culture can be dated up to 6000 or more years ago...In my time making art in Detroit, copper has always been the most coveted scrap metal, scavenged from any place possible. Scrapping has slowed in Detroit in the last 10 years, but the importance of copper in Detroit is a system that’s thousands of years old, moreover, it’ s a continual form of currency, trade, and a coveted material.” Hocking considers the exhibition to be a culmination of two decades of producing his work in Detroit. The various stages of his practice as an artist are represented by iconic artifacts and sculptures as well as photographic images of several of his significant projects including the Tower of Babel and the Celestial Ship of the North (Emergency Ark) aka The Barnboat. He notes that all of the projects in the show tie into the concept of all that is OLD. With OLD, Hocking addresses the looming presence of a large column in the middle of the gallery with a site- specific installation inspired by a visit he made to the Paris Catacombs in 2015. Throughout history mankind has built cities on top of the cities and graves of the people who came before them. Hocking states that in Detroit, ancient Native-American burial mound sites are in the more industrialized and worked over parts of the city. “...There's a connection to the ancient past, tied in with my familial past, tied in with my personal history.” Hocking is recognized internationally for his interventions into urban and rural landscapes that reference mythology, mysticism and folklore. He has produced and documented numerous site-specific installations in Australia, France, Germany, and Mexico, as well as in multiple locations in the U.S. including Georgia, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Texas and Michigan. His work has been included in numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally including the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Smart Museum of Art and the Kunst-Werk Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin, among others.