KAWS artist in his studio with paintings and sculpture

Blurring the lines.

Blending Street Art and Fine Art

KAWS, Along the Way (Black), 2019 For Sale - Lougher Contemporary

b. 1974

KAWS

KAWS is a Brooklyn-based artist whose influential body of work masterfully synthesizes the worlds of art and design. Across painting, murals, large-scale sculpture, and street art, as well as graphic and production design, his work possesses a sophisticated humor and thoughtful interplay with consumer products through collaborations with global brands. KAWS is often inspired by and appropriates pop culture animations to form a unique artistic vocabulary that spans a broad range of mediums. Now admired for his larger-than-life sculptures and hard-edge paintings that emphasize line and color, KAWS has created a cast of hybrid cartoon and human characters that are perhaps the strongest examples of his exploration of humanity. KAWS has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions of his work have been held at institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; the Yuz Museum; Yorkshire Sculpture Park; and the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga. He has also participated in exhibitions at major institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Newcomb Art Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Deste Art Foundation for Contemporary Art.

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About the artist

KAWS is an American graffiti artist and designer renowned for his toys, prints and his ‘subvertisements.’ Famed for its set of cartoon-like characters, KAWS's art parodies popular cultural icons such as Disney’s Mickey Mouse and operates at the interface between the commercial and fine art worlds and is often compared to the likes of Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons.

Born in 1974 in the metropolitan area of New York, surrounded by a burgeoning graffiti and street art scene, KAWS produced his first pieces whilst in elementary school. It was then that he devised his own tag: KAWS. A meaningless word, he chose it simply because he liked the way the letters looked together. Moving to New York in the 1990s, KAWS began to experiment with an artistic process dubbed ‘Subvertising’. Through subvertising, KAWS would remove advertisements from phone booths and bus stops and replaced them with his own signature cartoon characters, tagging the city with his distinctively parodic style.

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