Brian Donnelly, the artist known as KAWS
Brian Donnelly, aka KAWS, has tapped into the zeitgeist to straddle the divide between art and commerce. And not everyone’s happy about it.
Last month, a painting by the 44-year-old American artist Brian Donnelly, aka KAWS, set a record for the artist when it was sold at auction by Sotheby’s in Hong Kong. It was a 40 by 40-inch canvas painting of the entire cast of characters from the animated TV show The Simpsons in a riff on the cover of the Beatles 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Called The KAWS Album, the painting sold for $HK115.9 ($20.6 million) — nearly 15 times the highest estimate Sotheby’s had for the work and more than five times the previous record for a KAWS work (set in 2018). The painting is believed to have been bought by Justin Bieber — based on an Instagram post by the singer shortly after the sale. In 2018 Donnelly’s work generated a total of $US33.8 million at auction, a 260 per cent increase on the previous year.
It’s a long way from his early days as a graffiti artist. The now Brooklyn-based Donnelly grew up in New Jersey and started his life in art as a teenager, when he would take the train into New York City and leave his KAWS tag on downtown walls and buildings. He chose the name KAWS, he says, simply because he liked how the letters looked together. In the 1990s, KAWS gained attention as a street artist by producing what he refers to as “alternate advertising”. He would crank open bus shelter advertising casings at night, remove the posters and take them back to his studio, where he would paint cartoon faces over the models, with crosses for eyes, then return the posters to the bus shelters before dawn. A line of Mickey Mouse-inspired collectable toys, called Companion, soon followed, and the character quickly made its way into paintings and large-scale sculptures.
KAWS has also done collaborations with brands such as Nike, Uniqlo, Commes des Garçons and Dior. He’s designed album covers for Kanye West. And in 2012 he designed a balloon for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
The often highly commercial aspect of his work hasn’t stopped KAWS from gaining recognition as a serious artist. His work has been acquired by significant public collections around the world, and bought by private collectors such as Larry Warsh, who owns an important collection of works by Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat; the influential Alberto Mugrabi, whose family owns the world’s largest private Andy Warhol collection; and the musician Pharrell Williams, among others.
A major KAWS exhibition in 2016 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, drew a record crowd before travelling to the Yuz Museum in Shanghai the following year. That same year, the artist had a solo presentation at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the UK. A survey exhibition of his work curated by the Italian art historian Germano Celant has just wrapped at the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Foundation. And in September this year KAWS will have a career survey exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne — his largest to date.
Given the nature of KAWS’s work, however, it’s not surprising that his ascent into the upper ranks of the art world has been met with some criticism. In his essay for the catalogue of the Fort Worth exhibition, the former curator of the museum, Michael Auping, wrote that “KAWS is [art critic Clement] Greenberg’s worst nightmare and a philosophical challenge to those of us who, perhaps secretly, want to believe in fine art ‘purity’ and the separation between high and low.” The Independent, in its review of KAWS’s Yorkshire exhibition, said his work was “likeable but bland”. And while The Telegraph in the UK called him a “superstar”, it qualified that compliment by saying he had achieved said status “in a cultural sphere where fine art, fashion brands and social media naturally interact — where Pharrell Williams is known as an artist as much as a musician, and Kanye West and Justin Bieber are major cultural patrons.”
After the record sale of The KAWS Album last month, The Art Newspaper published a commentary piece titled “Why KAWS is not a great artist” and said that his work was “conceptually bankrupt.” But the intersection between art and commerce in KAWS’s work is precisely what drew him to the attention of the NGV.
“When we started talking to him about three years ago, to be honest we weren’t so conscious of his popular appeal,” says its director, Tony Ellwood. “For us it was the crossover that he did so successfully, and it was really where we were starting to take the NGV. The fact that there is currently this slippage between art and design, and the way that he collaborates with fashion and with other artists and graphic art … there were quite a number of triggers that made us think he is somebody we would want to prioritise at the moment.”
The NGV exhibition, titled KAWS: Companionship in the Age of Loneliness, will open on September 20. A full survey of Donnelly’s work, it is being billed as the most comprehensive one to date. It will include paintings reworking pop culture figures, medium-sized sculptures, and examples of the artist’s collaborations with other artists and major brands. To accompany the exhibition, the NGV has commissioned a monumental bronze sculpture that will be part of the gallery’s permanent collection. The 8.5-metre-tall sculpture will occupy the Federation Court area on the ground floor of the NGV International building during the exhibition and will be the biggest bronze sculpture of one of his Companion figures KAWS has ever undertaken.
When WISH met Donnelly at his studio in Brooklyn, he and his team of five studio assistants were busy working on myriad projects. He was tight lipped about any detail of the sculpture he is working on for the NGV, except to say, “that’s something I’m really excited about”. In person, KAWS has a relaxed and unassuming nature more akin to a skateboarder than an artist whose paintings sell for millions. He also gives the impression of being someone who just goes with the flow. Projects have come about, he says, just because he was asked to do them and he thought they sounded cool.
One example is the work he did for Dior’s 2019 spring summer menswear runway show, the first for designer Kim Jones. Taking centre stage at the collection show and towering over the models was a 10-metre-high effigy of Christian Dior as one of KAWS’s Companions and made of 70,000 flowers. Donnelly says he and Kim Jones had been friends for a while and were looking for a way to work together. According to Donnelly, Jones sent him a message asking if he wanted to collaborate on his first show together and “I was like, yes, this is perfect,” he says. “It just seemed like untapped territory for him and for me. Louis Vuitton has a history of collaborations with artists, but this seemed like a very new approach for Dior and it just grew from there.”
The collaboration between Dior and KAWS also extended to select merchandise used throughout the collection, and his flowered-covered Companions featuring in the brand’s advertising campaign for that season as well as in stores.
Working for brands, says Donnelly, comes naturally to him. “I feel like I grew up around people making things for streetwear and that just naturally got my interest. It has a lot to do with how I grew up and how I got interested in things. I wasn’t really taken to museums or anything; streetwear and stuff were the things that I was hungry for, and I was curious about what’s out there and who’s making it.”
Donnelly is keenly aware that his approach to mixing the worlds of fine art and commerce doesn’t please everyone, but that attitudes are changing thanks to the digital world we now live in.
“In the 1990s there was definitely a feeling of it being taboo, and that you could either be a fine artist or a commercial artist but you can’t be both,” he says. “And you have to choose which way you want to go and to focus on that. And I thought it was such bullshit. Now it seems obvious that you could do all these different things and exist in these different ways, and that one doesn’t detract from the other. But for me the only artist that I looked at who was doing something like that was Keith Haring and what he did with the Pop Shop.”
For several years Donnelly had his own shop in Japan but he closed it, he says, because it was too much business and not enough creativity. “I’d rather do those spot moments when you just hop in and create something that exists for a little while,” he says. As well as a catalogue and a book for children, an assortment of KAWS gift-shop merchandise will be produced to support the NGV exhibition.
Ironically, Donnelly says it dawned on him that he wanted to make [affordable] products for people to buy by visiting museums. “You’d see a shop there full of stuff, products made for all those artists that are dead that someone else designed. I just realised I want to design the stuff that’s going to be sold.”
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