KAWS: WHAT PARTY (Black on Pink edition)

Product Information

Access the 560,000 sqft Brooklyn Museum, which holds an art collection with roughly 1.5 million works A fully illustrated catalogue, co-published with Phaidon Press, accompanies the exhibition. Essayists include Daniel Birnbaum, art critic, curator, and director of Acute Art, and Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum. 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. It could potentially give more space to absorb the artwork. “For me, it’s a way to put the work I’ve been making for the past 20 or 25 years, and put it in front of people, and they’ll take from it what they can,” said Donnelly. 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.”

The Brooklyn Museum show, “ KAWS: WHAT PARTY,” does a good job taking KAWS seriously but not too seriously. They could have wasted a lot more time making overblown claims about the work’s profundity to try to justify its significance before the gaze of skeptics like myself. They don’t. The curator Eugenie Tsai says Donnelly’s artwork is a reflection of our times. “Love, friendship, isolation, loneliness, it’s a symbol of our time,” said Tsai. “Today, these themes are more relevant than ever before.”KAWS: WHAT PARTY traces KAWS’s twenty-five-year career, from his beginnings as a graffiti writer in Jersey City to his current status as a globally acclaimed artist based in Brooklyn. The exhibition highlights his wide-ranging practice, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, product design, large-scale public projects, and augmented reality (AR) work. KAWS is the alias of Brian Donnelly (American, born 1974), who chose the name based on the graphic possibilities presented by the four letters. Through vibrant paintings and sculptures of familiar pop culture–inspired characters, fashion and product design, and the incorporation of AR as an artistic medium, KAWS’s practice interweaves aspects drawn from the distinctive worlds of art, popular culture, commerce, and technology, shifting how we think about cultural production and consumption.

Donnelly, a Jersey City native, had already made a name for himself as a graffiti artist, under the handle of KAWS. However, that skeleton key, combined with Donnelly's artistic talents, ambition, and feel for the moment, enabled him to open up an entirely new avenue for his work. He began doctoring display advertising, winding his now-distinctive serpentine, cross-eyed characters around posters featuring willowy supermodels, disrupting the world of street art, while also drawing the attention of key figures in the worlds of fashion and fine art. 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). The title of the exhibition, What Party, sounds like the anthem for 2021 (there are no parties anywhere, what party?). That phrase means something different to the artist today, just as it does to have an exhibition despite the state the world with the ongoing pandemic.Through these collaborations, KAWS has been able to expand his practice into other creative industries while also broadening the accessibility—both geographically and financially—of his work. In addition to fashion and toys, KAWS has created furniture with the Brazilian design studio Estudio Campana, incorporating his characters into chairs and sofas. KAWS’s largest-scale works to date have been developed in collaboration with AllRightsReserved, a Hong Kong–based creative studio, creating COMPANIONs that dwarf the surrounding architecture in locations such as Hong Kong, Seoul, South Korea, and Virginia Beach in the United States. For twenty-five years, Brooklyn-based artist KAWS (Brian Donnelly, American, born 1974) has bridged the worlds of art, popular culture, and commerce. Adapting the rules of cultural production and consumption in the twenty-first century, his practice both critiques and participates in consumer culture. KAWS: WHAT PARTY is a sweeping survey featuring more than one hundred broad-ranging works, such as rarely seen graffiti drawings and notebooks, paintings and sculptures, smaller collectibles, furniture, and monumental installations of his popular COMPANION figures. Italso features new pieces made uniquely for the exhibition along with his early-career altered advertisements. 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. The concluding section of the exhibition centers on KAWS’s acclaimed COMPANION figure, in a number of forms. First appearing in the artist’s early ad interventions, COMPANION serves as a consistent figurative element throughout his work. On display are a number of newly fabricated COMPANION sculptures from the artist’s popular HOLIDAY project. These are juxtaposed with never-before-seen cinematic short films highlighting HOLIDAY, which saw the installation of monumental inflatable COMPANION figures in Seoul, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, as well as a virtual installation in outer space. The result is an immersive experience that brings visitors into KAWS’s world. By bringing COMPANION beyond white-walled galleries and into public spaces, KAWS ensures that the widest range of people can contemplate, interact with, and enjoy his work. Smaller versions of COMPANION are also on view in this section, showcasing KAWS’s attention to execution, craftsmanship, and seriality through extreme variations in scale. I’ve always felt public art was important,” said Donnelly. “To have that direct communication with the general public is really amazing.”

CHUM, a character KAWS has used to express human relationships, emotions, and states of mind, appears here in new work created especially for the exhibition. A series of vividly hued canvases, titled URGE (2020), focuses on CHUM’s face and gloved hands, both inscribed with the artist’s signature Xs. The paintings hang together in two rows of five, each canvas its own entity but directly in conversation with its companions. The single painting highlighted in the small adjacent gallery, TIDE (2020), portrays COMPANION taking a moonlit swim, one of the most atmospheric and evocative portrayals of this character to date. In a new sculptural work titled SEPARATED (2021), a seated COMPANION figure with its hands over its eyes could be seen as a reaction to the state of the world in 2020. The nearby paintings MIRROR (2018) and SCORE YEARS (2019) feature fragmented figurative and landscape imagery. 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.”KAWS’s start as a graffiti writer—tagging (writing on) physical surfaces in public spaces without license or permission—occupies a significant place in his artistic formation. Throughout the 1990s, KAWS left his mark on walls, freight trains, and billboards, sometimes working solo and sometimes collaborating with a crew. These early years laid the foundation for much of his subsequent practice, which uses large-scale, bold gestures to make an impact on urban and natural landscapes (as seen in his recent HOLIDAY series, on view in this exhibition). KAWS: WHAT PARTY highlights five overarching tenets of the artist’s evolving artistic practice. The first section brings together examples of KAWS’s earliest work, including graffiti drawings and notebooks from the early 1990s, on view for the first time in the United States. These works are accompanied by the artist’s early-career altered bus shelter and phone booth advertisements, which first brought him notoriety, as well as a collection of multimedia works that provide glimpses into his studio practice. KAWS: WHAT PARTY is curated by Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum. The exhibit starts with a life-sized pink sculpture of his Chum character, which is inspired by the Michelin Man, then goes into a room that shows his old notebooks, photos of his early graffiti tags. It segues into his 1990s ad-busting photos onto bus stop ads and shows a series of paintings featuring altered pop culture figures from The Simpsons, SpongeBob SquarePants, Snoopy and the Smurfs, all of which have X-ed out eyes. Claes Oldenburg has made many great public artworks, as well as smaller, more intimate objects and editions,” said Donnelly. “His use of scale to distort the viewers relationship to the work, as well as his choice of materials, was absolutely brilliant.”