KAWS: WHAT PARTY (Black on Pink edition)

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It could potentially give more space to absorb the artwork. “For me, it’s a way to put the work I’ve been making for the past 20 or 25 years, and put it in front of people, and they’ll take from it what they can,” said Donnelly. In glass vitrines, there are countless figurines and toys (including his Kaws MTV Moonman from 2013, which was used for the MTV Video Music awards and held in the hands of winners like Justin Timberlake), as well as his designs for Comme des Garçons wallets and Vans sneakers. Brooklyn-based KAWS is considered one of the most innovative artists of his generation. Within the Pop Art tradition, he has created a prolific body of influential work, which both engages young people with contemporary art and straddles the worlds of art and design to include street art, graphic and product design, paintings, murals and large-scale sculptures.

One groundbreaking piece is themed around his experience of getting Covid-19. The piece, entitled Urge (Kub2) was created in 2020, and details the artist’s interpretation of being in bed for three weeks with the virus. It shows his Chum character, having different colored paws over his torso and face, signifying “touching and contaminating”, said the artist. KAWS was breaking into private property and altering (or defacing, some would have claimed) paid advertisements. In place of the sweeping gestural letters necessitated by the scale of walls or billboards, the nature of spray paint, and limited working time, the additions he made to the ads were carefully outlined and painted to blend seamlessly into the smooth surface of the image.”He includes early work in this exhibition that traces his roots, the sort of stuff that typically is not seen as high art today. “I’m happy I have sketch books and pictures of graffiti walls from the early 1990s in the show, so many people put that stuff away or say, ‘This is the point where I became a professional artist,’” he said. “But that whole time when I was painting walls and freight trains, that was painting. I was thinking about visual compositions in terms of color and scale, things I think about now.” Today, art collectors across the world part with huge amounts to own a work by KAWS, the artist and subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. However, this wasn’t always the case. Our new book explains how the artist’s subversive advertising interventions helped introduce him to the wider world

Both the UT T-shirt collection and the art book will be available to shop at UNIQLO stores and on the brand’s webstore beginning September 7. Take a look at the collection in the gallery above. Indeed, it is an offline extravaganza (that will probably end up in a meta stream of online photos). “A lot of times, my work is only witnessed through print format, or online through jpgs, so this is a great opportunity to put original works in front of people.” Serpentine start 2022 with a multi-layered global project with the internationally acclaimed artist KAWS developed in collaboration with Acute Art and the online video game Fortnite. Original Story: After the release of their 2019 collaboration caused absolute pandemonium at a mall in China, KAWS and UNIQLO have announced they’ll be feeding the fan frenzy once more with an all-new collaborative collection. In 1993 KAWS began to engage with billboards as a platform for his signature,” Tsai writes. 1993 was also the year that KAWS – a New Jersey native – enrolled in Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts. He chose to major in illustration, and his higher education seems to have informed his extracurricular activities. As a graffiti artist, KAWS had already written on blank walls. However, as Tsai explains, billboards, with their colorful photographic images and formal characteristics, invited a different kind of response.Donnelly, a Jersey City native, had already made a name for himself as a graffiti artist, under the handle of KAWS. However, that skeleton key, combined with Donnelly's artistic talents, ambition, and feel for the moment, enabled him to open up an entirely new avenue for his work. He began doctoring display advertising, winding his now-distinctive serpentine, cross-eyed characters around posters featuring willowy supermodels, disrupting the world of street art, while also drawing the attention of key figures in the worlds of fashion and fine art. Two years later, taking on another Captain Morgan billboard—one that incorporated the look of graffiti - his tag appeared in large amber letters that harmonized with the liquor in the bottle held by the captain. It was in 1996, tagging a billboard advertising Marlboro cigarettes, that KAWS began to work deliberately with the content of the advertisement as a form of critique and commentary.” In addition to the Fortnite collaboration, Serpentine and KAWS will use an app developed by Acute Art to offer a bridge between the virtual and the physical worlds. All the paintings and sculptures in the exhibition as well as a miniature version of the entire show will exist as AR works on the Acute Art app and can be placed and viewed at home by viewers globally. They can also be shared on social media, making KAWS’ art visible across the world. ACUTE ART APP A virtual recreation of the show is available in Fortnite, allowing millions of players from all over the world to experience the exhibition from anywhere. All built by the Fornite Creative community, players will be able to explore the Serpentine gardens, interact with KAWS’ artworks and experience his iconic sculptures in a completely new way. KAWS: Companionship in the Age of Loneliness is a major contribution to the growing international reputation of this contemporary artist. It follows KAWS’s recent solo presentations at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2016), the Yuz Museum Shanghai and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2017) and the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Foundation (2019). This exhibition introduces audiences to the full range of KAWS’s artistic output, including a newly commissioned monumental sculpture (his largest bronze sculpture to date), paintings reworking pop-culture figures and an impressive collection of human-scale sculptural figures. KAWS’s collaborations with other artists will be explored in the exhibition and those with major brands on display in the dedicated pop-up shop along with his own products.

Claes Oldenburg has made many great public artworks, as well as smaller, more intimate objects and editions,” said Donnelly. “His use of scale to distort the viewers relationship to the work, as well as his choice of materials, was absolutely brilliant.” The curator Eugenie Tsai says Donnelly’s artwork is a reflection of our times. “Love, friendship, isolation, loneliness, it’s a symbol of our time,” said Tsai. “Today, these themes are more relevant than ever before.” In our new book, KAWS: WHAT PARTY, the Brooklyn Museum’s curator, Eugenie Tsai explains how the artist, real name Brian Donnelly, first came to wider attention with a series of uninvited interventions into our visual environment. The title of the exhibition, What Party, sounds like the anthem for 2021 (there are no parties anywhere, what party?). That phrase means something different to the artist today, just as it does to have an exhibition despite the state the world with the ongoing pandemic. The exhibit starts with a life-sized pink sculpture of his Chum character, which is inspired by the Michelin Man, then goes into a room that shows his old notebooks, photos of his early graffiti tags. It segues into his 1990s ad-busting photos onto bus stop ads and shows a series of paintings featuring altered pop culture figures from The Simpsons, SpongeBob SquarePants, Snoopy and the Smurfs, all of which have X-ed out eyes.

The first of KAWS’s larger sculptures was produced in 2006 to greet visitors to a shop dedicated to his own fashion and design label, OriginalFake. COMPANION (ORIGINAL FAKE), 2011, with one half of its body dissected to reveal its internal anatomy.

Immediately after graduating, KAWS took a post at an animation studio, and used leftover acrylic paint from his day job to create these flawless images. In many cases he added the skull-and-crossbones to the faces of the models featured, introducing the public to some of his now-familiar characters for the first time. The ingenious physical and augmented reality artworks from the most viewed art exhibit in history by the acclaimed artist KAWSKAWS is one of the most popular and recognizable contemporary artists, whose reach extends far beyond the art world into the realms of fashion, music, and popular culture at large. Beginning his career as a graffiti artist in the 1990s, KAWS has expanded his repertoire into painting, sculpture, drawing, product design, and augmented reality, together forming an artistic vision that unites all of these practices. KAWS has collaborated with some of the most prominent international brands, including Uniqlo, Comme des Garçons, Supreme, Nike, Dior, sacai, General Mills, and many more, and the book includes images of the artist’s studio by Jason Schmidt and a selection of KAWS’s previously unpublished preparatory drawings as well as work spanning his entire career, from his early graffiti days to his highly collectible vinyl toys, complex abstract paintings, and monumental public sculptures. Richly illustrated and featuring the most significant scholarship on his work to date, this book is a definitive study on the life and career of this extraordinary artist. Specifications: Drawing from Pop and Neo-Pop traditions, KAWS’s work straddles the line between fine art and popular culture, crossing the mediums of painting, sculpture, and printmaking, along with fashion, merchandise, and vinyl toys,” as per a description from the MoMA Design Store that will be one of the only exclusive retailers carrying the book. “This book, made in close collaboration with the artist, captures his exciting talent as never before, presenting work from across his career and exploring his unique ability to reshape the ways we think about contemporary art and culture today.” The Acute Art app offers a bridge between each of the different worlds. All the paintings and sculptures in the exhibition as well as a miniature version of the entire show exist as AR works on the Acute Art app and can be placed and viewed at home. I’m pleased to be exclusively launching my new Phaidon Contemporary Artist Series book with my longtime partner Uniqlo,” said Brian Donnelly, the artist behind KAWS, in a statement. “To celebrate the occasion, I designed a small capsule collection of T-shirts and sweatshirts that will be available for a limited time.”