By now legendary and universally recognized, KAWS’s Companion figures were first introduced in 1999 as a limited-edition run of 500 eight-inch toys. The small works sold out nearly instantaneously, and the edition’s success gave way to an entire lineage of characters and Companion variations—including the aptly named Four Foot Companion. Released in a series of six variations over several years, these large-scale versions of KAWS’s sought-after figures implicitly question the distinction between a toy and a work of sculpture. As collector and curator Ronnie Pirovino has noted, “The Four Foot Companion is an essential piece in a KAWS collection because they represent his leap forward into a more ambitious course with his work. The engineering that went into them is impressive.”
It is hard to overstate the reach of KAWS, an artist whose style and works have achieved the kind of pervasive global presence that puts him in league with Andy Warhol. Fully embracing the overlap of art and commerce, KAWS—the moniker of Brian Donnelly—has forged a style that collides cartoons and corporate mascots with a cheeky contemporary pathos, from his Mickey Mouse-esque Companions to the face-palming Astro Boy. Like other storied predecessors of Warhol’s milieu, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, KAWS first made his foray into art with graffiti, tagging around his native Jersey City beginning in high school. He would later move to New York, where he studied illustration at the School of Visual Arts. After graduating, he took work as a freelance animator and, at night, created “subvertising” by altering ads on billboards and at bus stops. According to Max Lakin, the artist reportedly cemented his visual style by the close of the 1990s, “trading in his lettered tag for a cartoon figure with X-ed out eyes and puffy crossbones plunged through its skull.”
What began as unsanctioned interventions of mass media and commodity culture evolved into full-blown, if winking, participation in these spheres—in 1999, KAWS worked with Japanese brand Bounty Hunter to create his first-ever vinyl toy. He would go on to create many more limited editions of these explosively popular and highly collectible sculptural figures, and worked with Medicom Toy to operate the brand and store OriginalFake in Tokyo from 2006 to 2013. Famously, in 2017, the Museum of Modern Art’s release of the KAWS Companion action figure led to unprecedented web traffic that crashed the museum’s web store. Endlessly blurring distinctions between high and low culture, KAWS has collaborated with a wide range of brands, including Burton, Vans, Supreme, Uniqlo, Dior, Kiehl’s, Nike, and Comme des Garçons.
In 2021, the Brooklyn Museum hosted the mid-career retrospective KAWS: WHAT PARTY. As the museum’s exhibition text put it, “KAWS’s practice acknowledges that works of art can occupy multiple realms—the aesthetic and the transcendent, the commodified and the priceless—and emphasizes that even within a cultural environment shaped by image and consumption, universal emotions such as love, friendship, loneliness, and alienation remain constant.”
When I was younger ... There was a lot of ‘this is fine art’ or ‘this is not fine art’; ‘this is commercial’, ‘this is high art’. In my mind I thought, art's purpose is to communicate and reach people. Whichever outlet that's being done through is the right one.
KAWS (Brian Donnelly)
KAWS (Brian Donnelly) b. 1974
American artist and designer Brian Donnelly, better known by the moniker KAWS, is widely known for his distinctive art and cast of collectible figurative toys that have consistently subverted distinctions of high and low culture. Born in New Jersey, Donnelly took KAWS as his graffiti tag in high school, continuing to practice as a graffiti artist when he moved to New York and attended the School of Visual Arts. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in illustration in 1996, subsequently taking work as a freelance animator for Disney. During this time, fellow “Beautiful Loser” artist Barry McGee literally gave Donnelly a key to a new kind of success: a so-called skeleton key that allowed Donnelly to open street advertisement vitrines in order to augment and alter them.
In 1999, Donnelly collaborated with the Japanese brand Bounty Hunter to create a limited edition of small-scale vinyl Companion toys. As he gained recognition and popularity, he continued to rework pop culture icons, effectively “hacking” recognizable cartoons and mascots including Mickey Mouse, SpongeBob, Garfield, Snoopy, and the Michelin Man to make them his own. The demand for these limited editions, which range in size from miniature to life-size to monumental, has at times been overwhelming: in 2017, the MoMA Design Store released a limited edition of KAWS Companion figures and their website was subsequently crashed by the traffic.
KAWS’s career has been defined by his mass appeal and his relatively unique, mercurial position in fine art and commercial markets, leading to comparisons with Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Jeff Koons. As Chris Lee has written for the Los Angeles Times, “By parlaying vandalism into a brand identity as a purveyor of mass-produced collectible toys, KAWS became a bona fide subculture celebrity with a recognizable presence in street fashion.” Among the brands that Donnelly has collaborated with are Vans, Supreme, Dos Equis, Hennessy, Kiehl’s, Nike, Comme des Garçons, and Uniqlo, and his work is held in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, and the High Museum of Art, among others.
Auction Results KAWS (Brian Donnelly)
