Longtime Supertouch buddy KAWS‘ (aka: Brian Donnelley) fame is at an all-time high, a fact celebrated this month with the opening of his ominously-titled mid career retrospective Where The End Starts at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas. Spanning the worlds of graffiti, pop art, and consumer culture, KAWS’s bodies of work are highly charged, each conveying his underlying wit, irreverence, and affection for our times, as well as his agility as an artist. He has primarily looked to and appropriated from pop-culture animations (including The Smurfs, The Simpsons, SpongeBob, Hanna-Barbera, and Peanuts) to form his artistic vocabulary for his paintings, drawings, and sculptures. Now well known for his larger-than-life sculptures and hard-edge paintings that emphasize line and color, KAWS’s cast of hybrid cartoon/human characters, with similarities to popular cartoon figures and logos like Mickey Mouse and the Michelin Man, are perhaps the strongest examples of his exploration of humanity. These figures have amicable names—Chum, Companion, Accomplice—and express and provoke an array of human emotions, from sad, overwhelmed, pathetic, and weary, to shy. They reflect feelings and situations we can empathize with in presentations that are balanced with humor, heartening in their cartoon aesthetic.
The show remains on view through January 22, 2017 before traveling to the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, China in March 2017.
Pharrell takes his collecting seriously
KAWS leads guided tours daily beginning at 8am sharp…
