KAWS

‘It was really since I was a child that I leaned into art [...]. I saw art as a place I just went to. I loved that you could do it in a solitary kind of way, and bring it out into the world when you wanted. It just seems something like that could go on forever, until the end.’

KAWS, ‘An Interview With KAWS’, in LUX Magazine, Autumn/Winter 2022/2023

‘That series […] came about because I wanted to scale up the images, and then wanted to see them cropped differently, and then with more bars. Seeing the paintings side by side suggests the progression.’

KAWS, ‘Dan Nadel in conversation with KAWS’ in KAWS, New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2023

‘The KAWS family of figures – with features he appropriates from the pop-culture zeitgeist – recur throughout his paintings, drawings, small-scale figurines, and larger-than-life-size sculptures. Though not quite human in form, these figures express a range of human emotions and pathos in their gestures and poses – from companionship to loneliness, from melancholia to unbridled joy. The cast of characters that populate the KAWS universe speaks to the complex reality of life in our contemporary world.’

‘Coverage: KAWS “Family”@Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada’, in AllStreetArt, 31 October 2023

‘Because of their short narratives, cartoons are designed to simplify human emotions: happy/angry, good/bad. KAWS introduces more complex and subtle feelings, such as melancholy, disgust, pride, and envy. This is existentialism absorbed into a cartoon world.’

M. Auping, ‘America’s Cartoon Mind’, in KAWS: Where the End Starts, exh. cat., Fort Worth: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 2017

‘While one might expect that KAWS’s work would be entirely indebted to Pop art, his process suggests an equal debt to Minimalism, in which abstract parts of materials are rearranged to create different types of wholes. His approach is similarly deconstructive in a Frankensteinian way. KAWS steals parts from various characters to create new ones and the result of these oddly proportioned conglomerates is a peculiar, some might say pathetic but also endearing, humanness.’

M. Auping, ‘America’s Cartoon Mind’, in KAWS: Where the End Starts, exh. cat., Fort Worth: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 2017

‘What [KAWS’s] art aspires to is a reintroduction of humanity into forms that have been constructed to communicate the brutal humour and heroism of cartoons.’

D. Birnbaum, ‘Expanded Pop: Art in a New Era’, in KAWS: WHAT PARTY, exh. cat., Brooklyn Museum; New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2021

‘His large sculptural works […] give expression to a rich emotional register. They capture moments of sorrow, compassion, and companionship. Although assembled out of body parts from known cartoon characters, they convey intimacy. The vulnerability of the often massive creatures placed in the public realm is obvious to audiences, who want to share their regrets and doubts, their loneliness and grief. They create a sense of connectedness in a world of total commodification and accomplish and unlikely reintroduction of human attitudes and emotions where these seem unlikely.’

D. Birnbaum, ‘Expanded Pop: Art in a New Era’, in KAWS: WHAT PARTY, exh. cat., Brooklyn Museum; New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2021

‘I love colour. I mean honestly, but I can’t say that I’m thinking while I’m doing it. It feels very spontaneous and natural. Sometimes I’ll try to put myself into weird positions with colours – like with ugly colours, to think, How am I going to get out of that?’

KAWS, ‘Dan Nadel in conversation with KAWS’, in KAWS, New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2023

‘These are not happy chappies but figures to which we can relate on an authentic level as they, like us, endeavour to find their way through the maelstrom of life. They succeed as sculpture in their adamant declaration of crucial sculptural qualities – scale, surface and materiality, balance and volume, and spatial relationships – in a vivid and inimitable way.’

C. Lilley, ‘Size, Scale and the Public Realm’ in KAWS, New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2023

‘A lot of the imagery in MIRROR is from line art. Those rock formations are from images of caves that I abstracted. So that’s a combination of digital drawings, scanned ink drawings that I convert to vector art and preexisting sources. I mostly compose my paintings digitally. Once I have a black-and-white digital composition, I print it out and designate colours for each area. […] It’s not that I know exactly in the end what it’s going to be, but I understand how, say, this muted purple is going to make this other colour twang or pop, or if I want to calm an area, I can do this. I’ll be at the table downstairs with a sheet for each painting. That’s why a lot of times, the bodies of work have similar colour schemes.’

KAWS, ‘Dan Nadel in conversation with KAWS’ in KAWS, New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2023

‘KAWS’s practice recognises that artworks can occupy multiple realms – the aesthetic and the transcendent, the commodified and the free. He emphasises that even within a world shaped by image and consumption, universal emotions – from love and friendship to loneliness and alienation – are what binds us. What could be more appropriate at this time of isolation than this affirmation of the importance of our connections to one another? Yet behind KAWS’s bright colours and familiar imagery, something subtly sinister is always lurking – there to shake us from our consumerist haze.’

A. Pasternak, ‘Kaws: What Party’, in KAWS: WHAT PARTY, exh. cat., Brooklyn Museum; New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2021

‘The trajectory of KAWS has been marked by his ability to cross disciplines’ boundaries and push our conceptions of what an artist, artwork, exhibition, collector, and audience can be. Within the Pop Art tradition, he has created works that straddle the worlds of art and design to include street art, graphic and production design, paintings, murals and large-scale sculptures.’

H. U. Olbrist and B. Korek, ‘Foreword’, in KAWS: NEW FICTION, exh. cat., New York: The Monacelli Press, 2023

‘When creating SMALL LIE, I was thinking of the relationship I’ve had to wood toys growing up and the warmth and feeling they have when you hold them in your hand or place them on a shelf or table and stare at them. I wanted to expand on that, to create a wooden sculpture that makes you feel small but at the same time I want the viewer to feel like they should somehow help or console the work, despite its towering size.’

KAWS, ‘KAWS: The Story Behind an Artwork, in the Artist’s Own Words’, in Blouin Modern Painters, February 2016

‘ALONG THE WAY, at the Brooklyn Museum, has two figures with their arms around each other, kind of leaning in. That was the first sculpture where I kind of moved beyond a single static figure and started thinking about narratives within the work itself. It asks the viewer to observe something else that’s going on inside the work as opposed to their physical relationship to it.’

KAWS, ‘Dan Nadel in conversation with KAWS’, in KAWS, New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2023

‘Thus a universal symbol, the skull – which the artist presents along with his tag in centres such as San Francisco, London, Berlin, and Mexico City – becomes his “artistic brand”. KAWS’ choice reveals his tendency to look for imagery accessible to all, but at the same time aiming at establishing a broader relationship of potential exchange with others. And it’s another identifying logo: “I use the X the same way that Mercedes uses the grill on their cars […] you see them in the rearview mirror and just have a glimpse and you see the style of the car going behind you.”’

G. Celant, in KAWS: He eats alone, exh. cat., Qatar Museums, Doha; Doha: Silvana Editoriale, 2020

‘Kaw’s sculpture PERMANENT THIRTY-THREE, 2008, it’s important for its direct, autobiographical content as self-portraiture. He has acknowledged that his recurring characters incorporate aspects of his personal responses to the world, but PERMANENT THIRTY-THREE overtly shows his own head thirty-three times in various candy colors in a way that diverges from his other caricatures. There are no skulls and crossbones, no X’d eyes. The artist’s head is the subject this time, cast in bronze and painted to look like plastic, as he has treated CHUM and his other characters, to destabilize what we think of as acceptable sculptural material. The faces are sober, with eyes gazing forward, like classical busts. Instead of being busts, however, the heads are severed at the neck in another break with fine art and one of the most traditional notions of how a sculptural figure should be portrayed.’

A. Karnes, ‘Pop in the Expanded Field’, in KAWS: Where the End Starts, exh. cat., Fort Worth: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 2017

‘In 1997, the year after he graduated from SVA, KAWS made the first of many trips to Japan, where his practice continued to evolve. He found himself in a world where an admiration for American street culture, and a subculture of collectible toys drawn from cartoons, coexisted in creative and entrepreneurial circles that were transforming these elements into what would become global cultural phenomenon. Although short in duration, his visits to Japan – Tokyo, in particular – and the network of relationships he formed there made an enormous impact on his practice.’

E. Tsai, ‘Kaws: What Party’, in KAWS: WHAT PARTY, exh. cat., Brooklyn Museum; New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2021


All works: © KAWS