The sculptures were re-created as toys, blurring the lines between art and commerce. 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. 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.Ĭompanion is the most visible of the KAWS posse, appearing over the past decade in new postures and combinations in monumental works. It sold out quickly.Ĭompanion was the first of more than 130 toy designs, which came to include such characters as Chum, Blitz, BFF and Milo, each immediately recognizable as KAWS figures by their XX eyes. 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.
In 1999, he partnered with Bounty Hunter, a Japanese toy and streetwear brand, to release his first toy. “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. Even in those early days, KAWS was hot on the resale market. These creations gained a following, to the point where work posted in the morning would disappear by lunchtime. 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. 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. Today, KAWS’s oeuvre encompasses art toys, sculptures and colorful paintings and prints that appropriate pop phenomena like the Smurfs, the Simpsons and SpongeBob SquarePants. KAWS was his tag, chosen simply because he liked the way it looked. In the beginning, Brian Donnelly was just a kid from Jersey City, New Jersey, who got into the graffiti thing.
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