From the time Kenny Scharf emerged on New York City’s downtown art scene in the 1980s, his elastic, fantastic practice has encompassed painting, sculpture, video, fashion, performance, and installation art. To these various disciplines one can now add landscape design. The garden at his Los Angeles home is, predictably, bonkers—a giddy wonderland of palm trees, cacti, and succulents mixed with decades-spanning artworks, ad hoc Day-Glo interventions, and plenty of Flintstones iconography. Like everything he creates, the garden proffers an invitation into the world of Kenny Scharf and his fractured fairy tale of cartoon-inspired surrealism and zany delight.
A native Angeleno, Scharf returned to his hometown in 1999 after heeding the siren call of Gotham in the late 1970s, and living in Brazil and Miami in the 1980s and ’90s, respectively. He purchased a modest home built in 1959 in Culver City, hard by the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook, with sweeping views of downtown LA to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. Despite the date of construction, the house eschews the rigor of classic LA midcentury-modern architecture—it’s more of a charming, woodsy cottage, adorned with a smattering of vaguely Alpine flourishes. “Nothing about this place has changed. When I bought it, it had the original fixtures, lighting, and kitchen appliances, and they’re all still here,” Scharf says of the structure’s oddball allure.
Along with its eccentric details and grand vistas, the house possessed one further enticement—an established garden cultivated by former owner, Irwin Overbach, an erstwhile president of LA’s longtime landscape resource Rolling Greens. Scharf’s first order of business was removing an existing lawn. “I’m aware of climate change and the need for water conservation, so I just expanded on the cactus and succulents that were already there,” the artist recalls. His most dramatic alteration, however, involved placing his own artworks throughout the landscape, creating a vivid, polychromatic foil to the abundant greenery. The first signal that you’ve entered Kennyland is a totem pole of stacked sculptures from a 1995 exhibition in Miami, which rises from the landscape beside the entry drive. In the garden by the pool, the artist assembled a group of cast-bronze sculptures to create an otherworldly fountain.
