KAWS: WHAT PARTY (Black on Pink edition)

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KAWS engages audiences beyond the museums and galleries in which he regularly exhibits. His prolific body of work straddles the worlds of art and design to include paintings, murals, graphic and product design, street art, and large-scale sculptures. Over the last two decades KAWS has built a successful career with work that consistently shows his formal agility as an artist, as well as his underlying wit, irreverence, and affection for our times. His refined graphic language revitalizes figuration with both big, bold gestures and playful intricacies. The timing somehow seems perfect even though we started planning it well before the pandemic. It feels like an accomplishment to organize and open an exhibition under these circumstances. I’m very thankful to my studio and everyone at the museum for the work they put in during these challenging times.” KAWS (b. 1974, Jersey City, New Jersey; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) has exhibited extensively in renowned institutions, including solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2019); Fire Station, Qatar Museums, Doha, Qatar (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Michigan (2019); Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, Missouri (2017); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2016), which traveled to the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2017); Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Longside Gallery, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom (2016); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2015); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Málaga, Spain (2014); Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas (2013); Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2013); High Art Museum, Atlanta, Georgia (2011); and Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2011).

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. Access the 560,000 sqft Brooklyn Museum, which holds an art collection with roughly 1.5 million works Get up close to graffiti drawings, paintings, smaller collectables, furniture, sculptures, and recent augmented reality projects In the fourth section, visitors enter a corridor highlighting KAWS’s collaborations with other designers and brands in fashion and industrial design. A wide selection of preparatory sketches and furniture, produced together with the Brazilian design studio Campana Brothers, as well as toys and other products, showcases the artist’s exploration of other creative industries as a way to expand both his artistic practice and the public’s access to his work. By working with commercial industries to create products on a larger scale, KAWS continues to blur the boundary between populist and elite art, departing from the established notion that fine art must be exclusive or one of a kind. This accessibility, in turn, has gained the artist a large and dedicated global following.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.”

He has a soft spot for the location of his new show. It was the first New York museum to acquire his artworks, a pair of wooden sculptures in the museum’s lobby called Along the Way. Is KAWS an artist for the ages? Any artist who works with appropriated pop culture is going to be compared to Andy Warhol. But put it this way: He’s probably less a new-model Andy Warhol than a new-model Peter Max.KAWS’s roots as a graffiti writer and street artist laid the groundwork for his creative vision, which has unfolded largely outside the established art world and grows out of a keen appreciation of public space, both real and virtual, as a platform for reaching an expanded audience. His early work, in the 1990s, began with tagging or writing his alias on walls, train cars, and billboards, and evolved into more pointed public interventions involving manipulating advertisements. Often KAWS added his distinctive logo of a skull and crossbones, with Xed-out eyes.