“Today, these themes are more relevant than ever before.” “Love, friendship, isolation, loneliness, it’s a symbol of our time,” said Tsai.
The curator Eugenie Tsai says Donnelly’s artwork is a reflection of our times. “To have that direct communication with the general public is really amazing.” “I’ve always felt public art was important,” said Donnelly. Last fall, his 20ft-tall bronze Chum character was plopped in front of the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe-designed Seagram building in New York. He has created bold public art pieces, such as the Companion sculptures on a rooftop in China and a sculpture of his Companion figure laying back in the water in Victoria Harbor in Hong Kong for a 40ft-long inflatable piece called Kaws: Holiday. He signals a shift in the art world – a hybrid artist bridging fine arts, commercial art and graphic design, as mainstream as he is meaningful. He designed album art for Kanye West in 2008, which led to other commercial projects. He got into animation work, then started designing toys, and is a top seller of collectible figurine dolls since his first vinyl toy with the Japanese clothing brand Bounty Hunter in 1999. Donnelly, who is 46, grew up in Jersey City, got into skateboarding, became a graffiti artist and became a culture jammer in the 1990s, when he cranked open bus stop advertisements around New York City, to slide in his own paintings atop of fashion ads. He doesn’t have an academic background and didn’t have his first exhibition until 2008. You won’t find Kaws dipping into a vocabulary of art jargon to explain his work. I was thinking about visual compositions in terms of color and scale, things I think about now.” “But that whole time when I was painting walls and freight trains, that was painting.
#Kaws brooklyn museum professional#
“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. He includes early work in this exhibition that traces his roots, the sort of stuff that typically is not seen as high art today. Photograph: Graham Denholm/Getty Images for NGV “It gets you thinking beyond your 10-block radius.”īrian Donnelly AKA Kaws in 2019. “It makes kids in Brooklyn know that there’s access, you can write your own script,” said Donnelly. He hopes this exhibition, too, inspires the next generation of artists. It was the first New York museum to acquire his artworks, a pair of wooden sculptures in the museum’s lobby called Along the Way. He has a soft spot for the location of his new show. Donnelly is apolitical, once saying: “I’m not trying to impose a way to feel about a work, I’m just sort of making the work and putting it into the world.” He has a studio in Williamsburg, wears sneakers and a snapback almost everywhere he goes and takes a backseat approach to interviews. “A lot of times, my work is only witnessed through print format, or online through jpgs, so this is a great opportunity to put original works in front of people.”
#Kaws brooklyn museum Offline#
Indeed, it is an offline extravaganza (that will probably end up in a meta stream of online photos). “For me, it’s a way to put the work I’ve been making for the past 20 or 25 years, and put it in front of people, and they’ll take from it what they can,” said Donnelly. It could potentially give more space to absorb the artwork. Photograph: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images
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