KAWS: WHAT PARTY (Black on Pink edition)

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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.”

KAWS engages audiences beyond the museums and galleries in which he regularly exhibits. His prolific body of work straddles the worlds of art and design to include paintings, murals, graphic and product design, street art, and large-scale sculptures. Over the last two decades KAWS has built a successful career with work that consistently shows his formal agility as an artist, as well as his underlying wit, irreverence, and affection for our times. His refined graphic language revitalizes figuration with both big, bold gestures and playful intricacies. 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.” Access the 560,000 sqft Brooklyn Museum, which holds an art collection with roughly 1.5 million works

KAWS: WHAT PARTY is curated by Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum. 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. 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. 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.

Brooklyn Museum

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. 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. He includes early work in this exhibition that traces his roots, the sort of stuff that typically is not seen as high art today. “I’m happy I have sketch books and pictures of graffiti walls from the early 1990s in the show, so many people put that stuff away or say, ‘This is the point where I became a professional artist,’” he said. “But that whole time when I was painting walls and freight trains, that was painting. I was thinking about visual compositions in terms of color and scale, things I think about now.”