ART-PRESENTATION: KAWS
KAWS (Brian Donnelly) is a New York-based artist who has made a name out of him designing limited edition toys and clothing. He is also a world-renowned artist who exhibits in Museums and Galleries Internationally. His art stands somewhere between fine art and global commerce. KAWS moved beyond the sphere of the exclusive art market to occupy a more complex global market.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Perrotin Gallerie Archive
Kaws presents two simultaneous exhibitions in Tokyo and Hong Kong at Perrotin Galleries. In his paintings, KAWS deconstructs his appropriation of iconic characters into forms that draw on the tradition of abstract painting. KAWS is a product of and an answer to the Pop legacy left behind by Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg, and he shares ground with the Japanese eclectic film and print maker Keiichi Tanaami and the American satirical painter Peter Saul. Together with Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami, KAWS spearheads the contemporary Pop contingent. KAWS was born in 1974 in Jersey City, New Jersey. He graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York where he obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts in illustration. In 1996, KAWS worked for Disney as a freelance animator. KAWS started his career in the early 1990’s tagging “Kaws” in different lettering styles all over New York City and other major metropolitan cities. In Jersey City, he built this reputation into an empire of followers, fans of art which allowed him to expand on his concepts and mediums into sculptures, acrylic paintings, screen prints and become one of the world’s biggest modern pop artists. Gaining a name for himself, KAWS moved on to something referred to subvertising, spoofs of real advertising. Essentially he started to take real ads from bus stops, put his own spin of X’d eyes and bones on them and place them back inside the bus stop glass for everyone to see. Hundreds were made and some would stay there for weeks until they were replaced with new real ads. Some of his early pop art was created in the year 2000 in a series entitled “Package Paintings”. This series included a spoof of the classic American cartoon, The Simpsons, and his version, The “Kimpsons”, questioned how cartoon characters could become so engrained into people daily lives and how much of an impact a cartoon could have as opposed to politics. Seeing the success of this series, KAWS continued to juxtapose other famous characters like the Smurfs, Snoopy, Mickey Mouse and even SpongeBob SquarePants. Around the same time of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, KAWS also began to design and create vinyl designer toy figures. His first collaboration was with Japanese clothing brand Bounty Hunter, then he continued to design more vinyl toys including ones for A Bathing Ape or “BAPE”. Then in 2006, KAWS partnered with toy company Medicom Toy to open his own exclusive store called OriginalFake. Within that collaboration, he released his most iconic figure, the KAWS “Companion”. A simple figure with a Mickey Mouse-like body and his traditional skull head with X’d eyes. These were not by any means Toys, they were very limited, extremely detailed and are now in Museums and Private Collections around the world. These sculptures were only several inches tall, but the artist moved on to create different sizes with different materials like fiberglass. This allowed him to create huge versions of the “Companion” sculptures that are over 32 feet high.
Info: Perrotin Gallery, Piramide Building, 1F, 6-6-9 roppongi, Minato-Ku, Tokyo, Duration: 22/3-11/5/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00 and Perrotin Gallery, 50 Connaught Road Central, 17th Floor, Hong Kong, Duration: 26/3-19/5/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.perrotin.com
