Muralist, painter, sculptor, and installation artist Kenny Scharf is best known for his fantastical, large-scale paintings of anthropomorphic animals and imagined creatures, as in Viva Mare Viva Mar (2011). Though Scharf’s brightly colored imagery is generally playful, he has remarked that darker themes exist beneath the surface of his works, visible upon closer inspection. Scharf was a part of the 1980s East Village Art movement, along with his good friend and fellow street artist Keith Haring. The artist says he has been influenced by all 20th-century art movements, including Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, the latter reflected in his appropriation of cartoon characters from television shows like the Flintstones and Jetsons and his humorous depiction of snack food in Maple Glazed Donut Over Fertile Landscape (2011). Scharf’s oftentimes dense and frenetic compositions also echo a Baroque sensibility.

Despite being credited with a Pop sensibility, Ed Ruscha defies categorization with his diverse output of photographic books and tongue-in-cheek photo-collages, paintings, and drawings. Ruscha’s work is inspired by the ironies and idiosyncrasies of life in Los Angeles, which he often conveys by placing glib words and phrases from colloquial and consumerist usage atop photographic images or fields of color. Known for painting and drawing with unusual materials such as gunpowder, blood, and Pepto Bismol, Ruscha draws attention to the deterioration of language and the pervasive cliches in pop culture, illustrated by his iconic 1979 painting I Don’t Want No Retro Spective. “You see this badly done on purpose, but the badly-done-on-purpose thing was done so well that it just becomes, let’s say, profound,” he once said. Equally renowned were his photographic books, in which he transferred the deadpan Pop style into series of images of LA—apartments, palm trees, or Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962), his most famous work.