KAWS CHUM pink (KAWS Chum pink)
By KAWS
Located in NEW YORK, NY
KAWS has used CHUM within the body of his work, for many years, to convey the nuances of human relationships, emotions, and moods. Born Brian Donnelly on November 4, 1974 in Jersey...
Resin, Vinyl
KAWS CHUM pink (KAWS Chum Companion)
By KAWS
Located in NEW YORK, NY
KAWS has used CHUM within the body of his work, for many years, to convey the nuances of human relationships, emotions, and moods. Born Brian Donnelly on November 4, 1974 in Jersey...
Resin, Vinyl
KAWS HOLIDAY: set of 6 works (KAWS black companion)
By KAWS
Located in NEW YORK, NY
. _ KAWS is an American graffiti artist and designer known for his toys, paintings, and prints. Born Brian Donnelly on November 4, 1974 in Jersey City, NJ, KAWS graduated with a BFA ...
Resin, Vinyl
KAWS Monster companion (KAWS Companion)
By KAWS
Located in NEW YORK, NY
More on KAWS: KAWS is an American graffiti artist and designer known for his toys, paintings, and prints. Born Brian Donnelly on November 4, 1974 in Jersey City, NJ, KAWS graduated w...
Resin, Vinyl
KAWS MONSTER (KAWS Companion)
By KAWS
Located in NEW YORK, NY
More on KAWS: KAWS is an American graffiti artist and designer known for his toys, paintings, and prints. Born Brian Donnelly on November 4, 1974 in Jersey City, NJ, KAWS graduated w...
Resin, Vinyl
KAWS CHUM companion (KAWS orange Chum)
By KAWS
Located in NEW YORK, NY
KAWS is an American graffiti artist and designer known for his toys, paintings, and prints. Born Brian Donnelly on November 4, 1974 in Jersey City, NJ, KAWS graduated with a BFA from...
Resin, Vinyl
KAWS CHUM (KAWS white Chum companion)
By KAWS
Located in NEW YORK, NY
KAWS is an American graffiti artist and designer known for his toys, paintings, and prints. Born Brian Donnelly on November 4, 1974 in Jersey City, NJ, KAWS graduated with a BFA from...
Resin, Vinyl
KAWS CHUM orange companion (KAWS Chum)
By KAWS
Located in NEW YORK, NY
KAWS is an American graffiti artist and designer known for his toys, paintings, and prints. Born Brian Donnelly on November 4, 1974 in Jersey City, NJ, KAWS graduated with a BFA from...
Resin, Vinyl
KAWS CHUM white (KAWS Chum Companion)
By KAWS
Located in NEW YORK, NY
KAWS is an American graffiti artist and designer known for his toys, paintings, and prints. Born Brian Donnelly on November 4, 1974 in Jersey City, NJ, KAWS graduated with a BFA from...
Resin, Vinyl
KAWS MONSTER (KAWS Companion)
By KAWS
Located in NEW YORK, NY
More on KAWS: KAWS is an American graffiti artist and designer known for his toys, paintings, and prints. Born Brian Donnelly on November 4, 1974 in Jersey City, NJ, KAWS graduated w...
Resin, Vinyl
KAWS Monster (KAWS Companion)
By KAWS
Located in NEW YORK, NY
More on KAWS: KAWS is an American graffiti artist and designer known for his toys, paintings, and prints. Born Brian Donnelly on November 4, 1974 in Jersey City, NJ, KAWS graduated w...
Resin, Vinyl
KAWS MONSTERS: set of 2 works (KAWS Companion set)
By KAWS
Located in NEW YORK, NY
More on KAWS: KAWS is an American graffiti artist and designer known for his toys, paintings, and prints. Born Brian Donnelly on November 4, 1974 in Jersey City, NJ, KAWS graduated w...
Resin, Vinyl
KAWS CHUM yellow (KAWS Chum Companion)
By KAWS
Located in NEW YORK, NY
KAWS is an American graffiti artist and designer known for his toys, paintings, and prints. Born Brian Donnelly on November 4, 1974 in Jersey City, NJ, KAWS graduated with a BFA from...
Resin, Vinyl
KAWS CHUM black (KAWS Chum Companion)
By KAWS
Located in NEW YORK, NY
KAWS is an American graffiti artist and designer known for his toys, paintings, and prints. Born Brian Donnelly on November 4, 1974 in Jersey City, NJ, KAWS graduated with a BFA from...
Resin, Vinyl
KAWS CHUM set of 5 works (KAWS Chum companion set)
By KAWS
Located in NEW YORK, NY
KAWS is an American graffiti artist and designer known for his toys, paintings, and prints. Born Brian Donnelly on November 4, 1974 in Jersey City, NJ, KAWS graduated with a BFA from...
Resin, Vinyl
KAWS Untitled Green Image From the Urge Series Signed Limited Screenprint
By KAWS
Located in Minneapolis, MN
About KAWS KAWS, born Brian Donnelly in 1974, is a renowned artist who has made a significant impact on the contemporary art scene.
Paper, Screen
KAWS MONSTERS: complete set of 4 works (KAWS Companion set)
By KAWS
Located in NEW YORK, NY
More on KAWS: KAWS is an American graffiti artist and designer known for his toys, paintings, and prints. Born Brian Donnelly on November 4, 1974 in Jersey City, NJ, KAWS graduated w...
Resin, Vinyl
KAWS Tokyo First mini poster
By KAWS
Located in New York, NY
KAWS (after) Kaws Tokyo First mini poster, 2001 Offset lithograph poster 11 3/4 × 8 1/4 inches Unframed; unsigned In 1996, Brian Donnelly, now known by his moniker KAWS, moved to New...
Offset
KAWS Untitled Orange Companion Signed Lithograph
By KAWS
Located in Minneapolis, MN
About KAWS KAWS, born Brian Donnelly in 1974, is a renowned artist who has made a significant impact on the contemporary art scene.
Paper, Lithograph
KAWS - Limited Edition Historic 1st Companion ever uniquely Hand Signed & Dated
By KAWS
Located in New York, NY
(see photograph) Manufactured by Bounty Hunter, Tokyo, Japan Brian Donnelly, the ex-Disney illustrator better known as KAWS, created his first vinyl toy in 1999: an eight-inch “Com...
Resin, Mixed Media
Small Lie (Brown), Limited Edition Companion in original packaging with hologram
By KAWS
Located in New York, NY
Brand new in original packaging Manufactured by Bounty Hunter, Tokyo, Japan Brian Donnelly, the ex-Disney illustrator better known as KAWS, created his first vinyl toy in 1999: an ...
Resin, Vinyl
Rare Carved Wood Kaws Hand Sculpture More Gallery Switzerland Wooden Toy Art
By KAWS
Located in Surfside, FL
Provenance: this comes from the fabricator who helped produce and finish them for KAWS. Brian Donnelly (born November 4, 1974), known professionally as Kaws (stylized as KAWS).
Wood
$650
Man w Gun "Sleuth" Original Ink Drawing Theater Film Caricature Illustration Art
Located in Surfside, FL
Baxter was succeeded by Brian Murray then Donal Donnelly, Jordan Christopher and Curt Dawson.
India Ink, Archival Paper
KAWS Red Blush companions (complete set of 2 works KAWS Companion)
By KAWS
Located in NEW YORK, NY
KAWS is an American graffiti artist and designer known for his toys, paintings, and prints. Born Brian Donnelly on November 4, 1974 in Jersey City, NJ, KAWS graduated with a BFA from...
Resin, Vinyl
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.
KAWS art toys have developed an avid audience in recent decades, and as in any robust collectible market, counterfeiters have followed the mania. Of course, you don’t have to worry about that on 1stDibs, where all our sellers are highly vetted.
From graffiti tagger to hypebeast obsession to auction hero — we chart the artist’s rise and his widening influence.