Kaws at the Contemporary Art Museum

5 May to 13 August 2017

Solo exhibition KAWS: FAR FAR DOWN at the Contemporary Art Museum, Saint Louis, Missouri.

The multifaceted artist KAWS is renowned for his inspired manipulations of pop-culture imagery, a practice that began in the early 1990s when the artist painted over existing advertisements in cities around the world. Since that time KAWS’s practice has encompassed realms of both art and design, extending into collaborations with such global brands as Comme des Garçons, Nike, Supreme, and Uniqlo.

For FAR FAR DOWN, the artist creates a site-specific painting on CAM’s 60-foot long Project Wall, the large-scale work serving as a backdrop for three new major paintings. In the Museum’s courtyard, KAWS debuts the most recent permutation from his sculpture series, TOGETHER—bronze painted figures in a consoling embrace. TOGETHER is immediately endearing, and at the same time evokes pathos and contemplation. The paintings on view on the Project Wall deliver a sustained visual display of clashing patterns and vibrant colors, with barely recognizable popular figures inlaid within the scenes as deceptively as camouflage. The title of the exhibition and the eponymous painting implies physical or emotional descent, although the status of the concealed forms within the work are open to conjecture...

KAWS at the Yuz Museum

28 March to 13 August 2017

Major survey exhibition KAWS at the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China.

KAWS at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

20 October 2016 to 22 January 2017

Major survey exhibition KAWS: WHERE THE END STARTS at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas.

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth hosts a major survey exhibition of the work of Brooklyn-based artist KAWS (American, born 1974) on view in Fort Worth through January 22, 2017, and traveling to the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, China, March through August 2017. Organized by Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth curator Andrea Karnes in close collaboration with the artist, this presentation features key paintings, sculptures, drawings, toys, and street art interventions to examine KAWS’s prolific career in depth, revealing critical aspects of his formal, conceptual, and collaborative developments over the last twenty years...

KAWS at More Gallery

12 June to 28 August 2016

Solo exhibition KAWS: GISWIL at More Gallery, Giswil, Switzerland.

KAWS at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

2 June to 6 December 2016

Solo exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, England.

This was the first UK museum exhibition of work by the renowned American artist KAWS, whose wide ranging practice includes painting, sculpture, graphic design, toys and prints. The expansive Longside Gallery featured the artist’s large, bright, graphic canvases immaculately rendered in acrylic paint, alongside towering sculptures in fibreglass and wood. The historically designed landscape of YSP became home to a series of monumental and imposing sculptures in KAWS’s trademark style – nostalgic characters in the process of growing up...

KAWS, Peter Saul at Gary Tatintsian Gallery

27 November 2015 to 2 March 2016

Included in group exhibition Mutated Reality at Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow, Russia.

Art confuses the subject with the predicate and gets lost in the moment when something needs to be expressed triumphantly. Belief in the co-existence of the painting and man in a common dimension ceases. We, however, still believe in something. For example, we believe in the inevitability of mutations, improvements, and instability since the role of such transformations was recognized as a great science. The artists in “Mutated Reality” mix and stir nostalgia for the past with an unappealing present that is ready to burn any flesh to ashes and vice versa...

KAWS in W Magazine

November 2015

Cover artwork and featured in article by Diane Solway Artistic License: Five Takes on Superstar Rapper Drake in W Magazine.

The art world’s most visible populist, the artist Brian Donnelly, who is known as KAWS, has long mined mass consumer culture and its proliferating platforms for his own ends. Taking a page from his teen-hood hero, the Pop artist Keith Haring, KAWS works inside, outside, and well beyond the white cube, seeing art object and product, museum, shop, and street as part of his creative universe. In his hands, iconic cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse and the Michelin Man are reimagined as Everymen you’re as likely to find in the form of a vinyl toy or a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon as you are to see in a gallery or museum. Meanwhile, his paintings, such as the cover image for this issue, nod to the zonked-out style of Peter Saul, with their exploding neon palette and graphic punch...

KAWS at the Newcomb Art Museum

9 September 2015 to 3 January 2016

Included in group exhibition A Shared Space: KAWS, Karl Wirsum, and Tomoo Gokita, at the Newcomb Art Museum, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana.

While the three artists’ works in this exhibition have few formal associations, KAWS as the collector, sees commonalities underlying Wirsum’s whimsical and brightly colored figures, Gokita’s sleek grayscale faceless portraits, and his own meticulous, brightly-colored paintings. Ramirez-Montagut explains, “This exhibition is a lyrical exercise in exploring the works’ points of contact as perceived by KAWS, despite their seeming dissimilarities. The viewer comes to see these artists’ mutual appreciation for popular culture, irreverent iconographies, humor, and impeccable craftsmanship together with a shared use of strong graphic forms that evoke visceral reactions.”...

KAWS at the Brooklyn Museum

10 June 2015 to 27 March 2016

Solo exhibition KAWS: “ALONG THE WAY” at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York.

Brooklyn-based artist KAWS straddles the line between fine art and popular culture in his large-scale sculptures and brightly colored paintings, thoughtfully playing with imagery associated with consumer products and global brands. ALONG THE WAY, KAWS’s colossal eighteen-foot-high wood sculpture, greets visitors in our Martha A. and Robert S. Rubin Pavilion and Lobby. Portraying a pair of gigantic figures with their heads lowered and with one arm around each other in a gentle embrace, the sculpture alludes to familiar childhood toys and cartoon characters while at the same time transforming their identities with a radical shift in scale, presenting them as monumental cultural presences...

KAWS at ArtZuid 2015

22 May to 22 September 2015

Included in open-air group sculpture exhibition ArtZuid 2015 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.