KAWS
WHY IS THE ART WORLD SO ENAMOURED?
“When your whole art is based on the lettering you choose, you kinda figure out what ones work together. I just liked the shapes of the k, a, w, s,” - Brian Donnelly .
At a preview held by Phillips for their recent 20th Century and Contemporary art auctions, two pieces (Untiltled (2012) and Moving the Mirror (2010)) by Brooklyn-based artist Brian Donnelly (American, b 1974.), better known as “KAWS”, somewhat divided opinion, with the wife of a well know politician commenting, “I think he’s trying to be Warhol”. Considered a “subculture hero”, Donnelly, like Andy Warhol, creates works that have mass appeal, using cartoon language to express deeply emotional themes and ideologies, that speak to audiences far beyond the museums and galleries in which he regularly exhibits. Bearing many of the stylistic hallmarks of pop art, his prolific body of work - which includes paintings, murals, large-scale sculptures, street art, graphic and production design - straddles the worlds of fine art and commerce. “Brian has a serious connection to the history of art in the past 40 years,” says curator Michael Rooks, who organized Kaws: Down Time, an exhibition of the artist at the High Museum of Art in Georgia. “He’s voracious.”
After graduating with a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, Donnelly spent his early career working as a freelance animator for Disney (where he contributed to films such as 101 Dalmatians, Daria, and Doug), and as a graffiti artist in Jersey City, New Jersey, before moving to New York in the early 1990s. Donnelly first developed an interest in the codified language of commercial images through his experiments with “subtervising” – a practice of parodying or spoofing corporate and political advertisements found on billboards, phone booths and bus shelters. Donnelly created public “interventions” by painting over advertising imagery with his own masterful acrylics of characters like Companion, Bendy and Accomplice, as well as his moniker KAWS. His subvertising has appeared in cities around the world, including London, Paris, Berlin and Tokyo, notable works include Untitled (Calvin Klein), Untitled (DKNY), and Christy Turlington Ad Disruption. As his notoriety grew, these “recovered ads” became increasingly sought after, and by 2008 they were selling for as much as $22,000 on eBay. Donnelly’s method of repeating iconic imagery is an attempt at making his characters universal to the point of ubiquitous, so that they’re instantly understandable to his audience, thus transcending both language and culture.
Kaws, Man’s Best Friend (2016) Photograph: ©Phillips
In 1999 Donnelly traveled to Tokyo, entering the world of vinyl toy making for which he is now renowned. Embracing the commercialist spirit of Claes Oldenburg (the reigning king of Pop sculpture), he collaborated with Japanese company Bounty Hunter to release his first figurine, an 8-inch tall version of his black and grey character Companion. These cartoonish figures, redolent of Pop Art and culture - and to some extent, resembling the works of Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons - instantly became a hit with the global art toy-collecting community. Recognising the potential of sculpture, Donnelly began making larger pieces. The culmination of this was Companion (Passing through), a sixteen-foot-tall iteration of one of the artist’s most iconographic recurring characters that sat outside Hong Kong's Harbour City in 2010 and later outside The Standard Hotel in New York. The sculpture, a human/animal/cartoon hybrid, is seen seated, head in hands, its posture and pose suggesting sadness, fatigue, and the feeling of being overwhelmed. Whilst critics have suggested the sculptures contemplative pose recalls Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker (1903), Donnelly told the Wall Street Journal, “I was thinking, God, if I had to sit there all day and have a million people pass me and stare, I'd be mortified. That would be the worst experience ever. That's where the pose came from.”
In his later work Donnelly developed his early interest in re-appropriating and manipulating commercial images through his incorporation of a stock of familiar television and pop-culture characters, including Snoopy, Spongebob Squarepants and The Simpsons, all of whom appear frequently in the toys, sculptures and paintings that make up his varied practice. Continuing to blur the boundaries between subvertisement and advertisement, in 2017 Donnelly worked together with Nike to produce an Air Jordan 4 shoe and Uniqlo to produce an affordable Peanuts inspired T-shirt and accessories collection. To that end, Donnelly is not just an artist, but a brand, the objects he produces for commercial consumption in direct dialogue with his art. As the value of his “salvaged” street art rose, Donnelly was encouraged to create original works which, of late, have become increasingly disjointed and fragmented, conveying a sense of collaged imagery. Whilst still emphasising line and colour, Donnelly deconstructs his appropriation of iconic characters into forms that draw on the tradition of abstract painting.
Kaws, Three works: (i) Small Lie (Brown); (ii) Small Lie (Black); (iii) Small Lie (Grey) (2017) Photograph: ©Phillips
According to Sotheby’s Mei Moses the average compound annual return for Kaws is 16.2%, with 100% of works increasing in value. But do sure-fire bankability and cultural omnipresence make Donnelly a worthy successor to his Pop art progenitors? Whilst fellow “art brut” artists Shepard Fairey and Banksy have achieved stratospheric prices at auction, they haven’t been adopted wholeheartedly as Donnelly has into an art world notoriously cyclic (and incestuous) by nature.
Pop art began in the 1950s as a revolt against the dominant approach to art and culture, but by the 1960s and ‘70s it had already begun the gradual transition into the canon of mainstream art. Since its inception in the late 1960s “street art” has developed from a sub-cultural preserve of outsiders, to arguably the world’s most practiced art form. A genre once associated with rebellion and protest, in the last decade, through a generation of curators and gallerists who grew up with Pop art, street art is making the same transition; simultaneously revered and renounced by public and critics alike.
Warhol was fascinated by ideas of abundance and the cult of celebrity, his screen-printed portraits (often taken from pre-existing publicity photographs) a comment on the consumption and consumerism that had come to define contemporary American culture. More than thirty years after his death, the age of consumerism shows no sign of abating. In a world of multifaceted, multimedia information, we’re bombarded with corporate imagery. “For a lot of people [Donnelly’s] work is important because it helps give them ownership over the contemporary visual lexicon,” said Harry Philbrick, curator of KAWS @ PAFA. “So much imagery that we see every day is controlled by corporations. KAWS takes that and makes it his own. In so doing, it’s powerful and even in a way liberating for people to see that happen.”
Kaws, Untitled (2012) , diameter 152.7 cm Photograph: ©Phillips
More comfortable with brands and licenses than many of his contemporaries in the street art movement, Donnelly is an artist with a great talent for marketing, who has managed to leverage his street art into lucrative gallery shows. Even early on Donelley’s “subtervising” led to direct collaborations with the commercial photographers and designers who produced the original ads and has been featured in numerous publications. With over 1.7 million followers on Instagram, arguably today’s truest métier of relevance, Donelly has become the darling of the art world, with works in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, the Brooklyn Museum and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Donnelly has said of his work, “even though I use a comic language, my figures are not always reflecting the idealistic cartoon view that I grew up on, where everything has a happy ending ... I want to understand the world I’m in and, for me, making and seeing art is a way to do that.” (KAWS, quoted in KAWS. WHERE THE END STARTS, exh. cat., Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, 2016, p.5).