KAWS
KAWS HOLIDAY Hong Kong (announcement)
2019

Name: KAWS HOLIDAY Hong Kong (announcement)
Brand: KAWS
Price: 275 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

KAWS HOLIDAY: Hong Kong 2019: Rare inflated promotional KAWS Holiday figure published by All Rights Reserved to advertise the debut of a large scale KAWS floating figure in Hong Kong's Victoria Harbour in 2019. Medium: Inflated plastic figure. Dimensions: 9x8 inches. Good to very good overall condition. Printed signature on the reverse; from a scarce edition of unknown. KAWS is a Brooklyn-based artist whose influential body of work masterfully synthesizes the worlds of art and design. Across painting, murals, large-scale sculpture, and street art, as well as graphic and production design, his work possesses a sophisticated humor and thoughtful interplay with consumer products through collaborations with global brands. KAWS is often inspired by and appropriates pop culture animations to form a unique artistic vocabulary that spans a broad range of mediums. Now admired for his larger-than-life sculptures and hard-edge paintings that emphasize line and color, KAWS has created a cast of hybrid cartoon and human characters that are perhaps the strongest examples of his exploration of humanity. KAWS has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions of his work have been held at institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; and the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga. He has also participated in exhibitions at major institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Newcomb Art Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Deste Art Foundation for Contemporary Art. Related Categories Street Art. Shepard Fairey. Damien Hirst. Pop Art. Kaws sculpture. Grey Kaws. Kaws Hong Kong. Kaws holiday. Takashi Murakami. Keith Haring

Creator:

KAWS (American)

Creation Year:

2019

Dimensions:

Height: 8 in (20.32 cm)Width: 9 in (22.86 cm)

Medium:

Plastic,Lithograph

Movement & Style:

Pop Art

Period:

21st Century

Condition:

Gallery Location:

NEW YORK, NY

Reference Number:

1stDibs: LU35438430682

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KAWS

In the beginning, Brian Donnelly was just a kid from Jersey City, New Jersey, who got into the graffiti thing. KAWS was his tag, chosen simply because he liked the way it looked. Today, KAWS creates all kinds of art — there are KAWS figures and toys, sculptures and colorful drawings, paintings and prints that appropriate pop phenomena like the Smurfs, the Simpsons and SpongeBob SquarePants.

In the late 1990s, the artist, a 1996 graduate of New York’s School of Visual Arts, was making a living as an illustrator for the animation studio Jumbo Pictures. Like young Hansel and Gretel with their trail of crumbs, KAWS would mark the morning route to his downtown Manhattan office with “subvertising,” “interrupting” fashion advertisements by adding his colorful character Bendy, its sinuous length sliding playfully around the likes of a Calvin Klein perfume bottle or supermodel Christy Turlington.

These creations gained a following, to the point where work posted in the morning would disappear by lunchtime. Even in those early days, KAWS was hot on the resale market.

“When I was doing graffiti,” he once explained, “it meant nothing to me to make paintings if I wasn’t reaching people.”

Instead of seeking entrée to the elite New York art world (which, frankly, wasn’t looking for a street artist anyway), KAWS moved to Japan, where a flourishing youth culture welcomed visionaries like him.

In 1999, he partnered with Bounty Hunter, a Japanese toy and streetwear brand, to release his first toy. Companion — an eight-inch-tall vinyl reimagining of Mickey Mouse, with a skull-and-crossbones head and trademark XX eyes — debuted with a limited run of 500. It sold out quickly.

Companion was the first of more than 130 toy designs, which came to include such characters as Chum, Blitz, Be@rbrick, BFF and Milo, each immediately recognizable as KAWS figures by their XX eyes. Fans have proved insatiable. In 2017, MoMA’s online store announced the availability of a limited supply of KAWS Companion figures; as avid collectors logged on to stake their claim, the website crashed — multiple times.

Companion is the most visible of the KAWS posse, appearing over the past decade in new postures and combinations in monumental KAWS statues and other works. These include Along the Way (2013), an 18-foot-tall wooden sculpture of two Companions leaning on each other for support; Together (2016), two Companions in a friendly embrace, which debuted during an exhibition of KAWS’s work at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, in Texas; and KAWS:HOLIDAY (2018), a 92-foot-long inflatable Companion floating on its back in Seoul’s Seokchon Lake. The sculptures were re-created as toys, blurring the lines between art and commerce.

KAWS’s visual language may be drawn from cartoons, but his work doesn’t necessarily evoke childlike joy.

“My figures are not always reflecting the idealistic cartoon view that I grew up on,” he explains in the catalogue for the Fort Worth exhibition. “Companion is more real in dealing with contemporary human circumstances . . . . I think when I’m making work it also often mirrors what’s going on with me at that time.”

KAWS's résumé reads like a record of major 21st-century pop-culture moments. It includes his work with streetwear brands like A Bathing Ape and Supreme; his design for the cover of Kanye West’s 2008 album, 808s & Heartbreak; and his collaboration with designer Kim Jones on the Dior Homme Spring/Summer 2019 collection, Jones’s debut as the fashion brand’s creative director.

Learn how to spot a fake KAWS art toy, and browse authentic KAWS figures, prints, sculptures and mixed media works on 1stDibs.