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Resource Pack INTRODUCTION Resource Pack INTRODUCTION KAWS found his way into graffiti through his love of skateboarding as a teenager, often making the short journey into Manhattan from Jersey City. Through graffiti, he put his tag on walls across New York City and began using the pseudonym ‘KAWS’ simply because he liked the way the formations of the letters worked together. After graduating from high school in 1992 he started using billboards and other public advertisements as canvases for his paintings. He began unlocking glass panel covered advertisements to add his own paintings in the studio and replace them in their cases. He used acrylic paint applied with no visible brush strokes, often making it seem like his additions were a part of the original ad. He later said that this wasn’t an attack on advertisers or a rebellion against their campaigns, but more that he chose adverts based on what he was visually attracted to. In 1997 KAWS first visited Japan, somewhere he had always had an interest in and was inspired by the products people in Japan were creating. Also inspired by Pop artists such as Claes Oldenburg and Tom Wesselmann, he began to make editions. KAWS saw creating toys as a way into the world of sculpture, a more conceivable and feasible way to produce his ideas in 3D form. The sculptures he eventually went on to create replicate the look and feel of his toys. He made his first toy, COMPANION in 1999 with Japanese company Bounty Hunter. In 2001 the founder of ‘*A Bathing Ape’ Nigo asked KAWS to collaborate with him on a clothing line. This commercialist attitude, akin to Oldenburg and more recently Takashi Murakami (a prolific Japanese artist) has driven KAWS to create many different products but maintains that he doesn’t separate art from product. Alongside this development in his career, he also started to paint large canvases as well as paintings inserted into plastic blister packages, some commissioned by Nigo, in his signature cartoon style. Versions of well-known cartoons became central characters in these paintings which included THE KIMPSONS, KAWSbob and KURFS. He was invited to exhibit THE KIMPSONS paintings in an exhibition in Tokyo in 2001 alongside a series of black and white paintings of KAWS’ character CHUM. OriginalFake, a company formed by KAWS and Medicom Toy, opened a Masamichi Katayama- designed store in Tokyo in 2006. The company was founded to create and sell clothing and toys. After a great deal of success, the artist decided to close the company in May 2013 (the seventh anniversary of the company). INTRODUCTION Packaged paintings became a regular feature in KAWS exhibitions and exist as crossovers between art, design and product. Characters including THE KIMPSONS and KURFS were included in these small paintings. ‘I did them as a series of packaged paintings. I had all these friends at the time who were collecting prototype toys and dropping three grand a figure. I was thinking, if I had that money I’d be buying artwork. I’d be buying drawings. But none of them were collecting art… I was interested in the idea of product as art. So I did a series of paintings all hand-painted on canvas, and then mass-produced these blister packs to hold them and the back had a die-cut shape that let you see the stretcher, like the little ‘squeeze me’ hole in the packaging of a toy.’ KAWS’ museum exhibitions include solo shows at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, High Museum of Art Atlanta, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut, Galerie Perrotin (Paris, Hong Kong and New York) and Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles. His work is held in variuos public collections including; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas; Rosenblum Collection, Paris; and Zabludowicz Collection, London. KAWS has collaborated with people including artists Pushead, Todd James, Mark Dean Veca and Hajime Sorayama; US companies Kiehl’s, Lucasfilm Ltd., The Simpsons Movie, Nike, Supreme and Marc Jacobs; and Japanese companies realmadHECTIC, *A Bathing Ape, Comme de Garçons and Undercover. ‘Art was something I always gravitated towards as a way of entering another place...’ CHARACTERS The characters KAWS creates become a sort of family for the artist “Yeah they talk to me. And it’s really annoying. They all exist in this grim little way. I don’t know if they each have a personality, but the COMPANION and ACCOMPLICE are definitely key… people.” KAWS’ characters have trademark features - skull and crossbones heads and X eyes. COMPANION was the first character to transfer from two to three dimensions, in the form of a limited edition toy KAWS developed whilst in Tokyo in 1999, in collaboration with Bounty Hunter. The COMPANION has been created in varying forms including with its head in its hands and even semi-dissected to reveal its innermost workings. These characters often stand or sit in downtrodden poses but as with GOOD INTENTIONS, the COMPANION appears more confident and self-assured. ACCOMPLICE is possibly inspired by the Pink Panther and by the rabbit from the cult film Donnie Darko. It is similarly unsettling and we are not sure if he is friend or foe, our accomplice or another’s, and in what endeavours. CHUM exudes can-do confidence and perhaps suggests the intimidation of corporate culture when inflated beyond individual human scale. BENDY, a serpentine character who infiltrated KAWS’ early advertisement disruptions, is seen in variations of form including BORN TO BEND. THE KIMPSONS characters reference the well-known US sitcom’s familiar individuals. KURFS and KAWSbob also hint towards recognisable characters from popular culture but with KAWS’ trademark features. MATERIAL/ COLOUR “there is no colour that couldn’t work together” The process of creating perfectly executed paintings involves beginning with a painting-by-numbers style image identifying the specific colour for each section. The sections are then filled in by the artist and his assistants and painted over many times in the same colour to create the strong, dense colour. The colours he uses are often his own creations. For his paintings he uses acrylic paint and applies it using foam brushes with the exception of fine lines. KAWS used acrylic paint when working with animation companies and he continues to use it. “Colour is just something I enjoy working with, you can change something so much with colour… pieces gain their own personality depending on how you position colours together.” KAWS, 26 November 2013 ARTPHAIRE: What are the tools you can’t live without? KAWS: I use hardware sponge brushes for the majority of the paintings. They are black foam on a wooden handle and they cost about $0.30. I started using them when I was painting over the advertisements, the bus shelters and phone booths in this Mylar material. When I got out of college, my first job was working in animation. I used to take some of the acrylic paint that they weren’t using home with me and use it to paint over ads, because it was the perfect material. MATERIAL/ COLOUR MATERIAL/ PROCESS KAWS creates beautifully crafted large scale sculptures using bronze, fibreglass, wood and aluminium which are shown in both indoor and outdoor locations. Some sculptures are painted and some left showing their wooden surface, as is the case with SMALL LIE. The large sculptures are made in sections and connected together upon each installation. Afromosia, a durable wood sometimes referred to as African Teak, is used for many of these sculptures. It is a wood that is relatively easy to work with and commonly used for boatbuilding, flooring and furniture. Corian (brand name) is a material made from a blend of acrylic and minerals and has a solid, hard surface. Its non-porous surface helps to give a smooth, un-blemished finish. KAWS has used Corian to create sculptures including HE EATS ALONE (WARM REGARDS) and NEW HOME. Installation of GOOD INTENTIONS at YSP Afromosia wood (604 x 304 x 248) HE EATS ALONE (WARM REGARDS) 2013 Corian (213 x 226 x 79) L: CHUM 2003 Plastic (33.02 x 20.32 cm) KAWS’ smaller works are often made using vinyl. ‘I love the way my drawings translate in the soft vinyl material. If one day I feel my work would look better in another medium I would stop using soft vinyl that same day. I do also like to experiment with other processes when I think the result would work better, for example the CHUM was made by bowl mold and the BENDY was a bendy toy with a case made by injection mold.’ SCALE Starting with small-scale sculptures seemed an accessible and acheivable way for KAWS to translate his characters into three dimensions. Producing toys became a way to simplify the realisation of creating sculpture and became a gateway to monumental sculptures. He approaches creating sculpture and toys with the same dedication and without distinction of one being high art and one not. KAWS purposely replicated certain characteristics from his series of toys into his large-scale sculptures and fully intended there to be a direct correlation between the two. Features including the seams on the joints of limbs remained in the large sculptures. SMALL LIE 2013 Afromosia 10 metres The COMPANION was originally created in 1999 as a seven and three-quarter inch toy and has continued to grow in scale since. The second version, in 2004, was a thirteen-inch toy; in 2006 it become a ten feet tall dissected version; and in 2007 a four-foot sculpture.
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