KAWSKAWS KACHAMUKKU (complete set of two works) 2022
2022
About the Item
- Creator:KAWS (American)
- Creation Year:2022
- Dimensions:Height: 12.75 in (32.39 cm)Width: 8 in (20.32 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:NEW YORK, NY
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU35439976802
KAWS
In the beginning, Brian Donnelly was just a kid from Jersey City, New Jersey, who got into the graffiti thing. KAWS was his tag, chosen simply because he liked the way it looked. Today, KAWS creates all kinds of art — there are KAWS figures and toys, sculptures and colorful drawings, paintings and prints that appropriate pop phenomena like the Smurfs, the Simpsons and SpongeBob SquarePants.
In the late 1990s, the artist, a 1996 graduate of New York’s School of Visual Arts, was making a living as an illustrator for the animation studio Jumbo Pictures. Like young Hansel and Gretel with their trail of crumbs, KAWS would mark the morning route to his downtown Manhattan office with “subvertising,” “interrupting” fashion advertisements by adding his colorful character Bendy, its sinuous length sliding playfully around the likes of a Calvin Klein perfume bottle or supermodel Christy Turlington.
These creations gained a following, to the point where work posted in the morning would disappear by lunchtime. Even in those early days, KAWS was hot on the resale market.
“When I was doing graffiti,” he once explained, “it meant nothing to me to make paintings if I wasn’t reaching people.”
Instead of seeking entrée to the elite New York art world (which, frankly, wasn’t looking for a street artist anyway), KAWS moved to Japan, where a flourishing youth culture welcomed visionaries like him.
In 1999, he partnered with Bounty Hunter, a Japanese toy and streetwear brand, to release his first toy. Companion — an eight-inch-tall vinyl reimagining of Mickey Mouse, with a skull-and-crossbones head and trademark XX eyes — debuted with a limited run of 500. It sold out quickly.
Companion was the first of more than 130 toy designs, which came to include such characters as Chum, Blitz, Be@rbrick, BFF and Milo, each immediately recognizable as KAWS figures by their XX eyes. Fans have proved insatiable. In 2017, MoMA’s online store announced the availability of a limited supply of KAWS Companion figures; as avid collectors logged on to stake their claim, the website crashed — multiple times.
Companion is the most visible of the KAWS posse, appearing over the past decade in new postures and combinations in monumental KAWS statues and other works. These include Along the Way (2013), an 18-foot-tall wooden sculpture of two Companions leaning on each other for support; Together (2016), two Companions in a friendly embrace, which debuted during an exhibition of KAWS’s work at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, in Texas; and KAWS:HOLIDAY (2018), a 92-foot-long inflatable Companion floating on its back in Seoul’s Seokchon Lake. The sculptures were re-created as toys, blurring the lines between art and commerce.
KAWS’s visual language may be drawn from cartoons, but his work doesn’t necessarily evoke childlike joy.
“My figures are not always reflecting the idealistic cartoon view that I grew up on,” he explains in the catalogue for the Fort Worth exhibition. “Companion is more real in dealing with contemporary human circumstances . . . . I think when I’m making work it also often mirrors what’s going on with me at that time.”
KAWS's résumé reads like a record of major 21st-century pop-culture moments. It includes his work with streetwear brands like A Bathing Ape and Supreme; his design for the cover of Kanye West’s 2008 album, 808s & Heartbreak; and his collaboration with designer Kim Jones on the Dior Homme Spring/Summer 2019 collection, Jones’s debut as the fashion brand’s creative director.
Learn how to spot a fake KAWS art toy, and browse authentic KAWS figures, prints, sculptures and mixed media works on 1stDibs.
- ShippingRetrieving quote...Ships From: New York, NY
- Return PolicyThis item cannot be returned.
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21st Century and Contemporary Pop Art Figurative Sculptures
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- KAWS Japan Holiday Companion (KAWS brown holiday companion)By KAWSLocated in NEW YORK, NYKAWS Brown Holiday Companion Japan (KAWS Mount Fuji Japan): This sold out KAWS figurative piece features KAWS' signature character COMPANION in a resting position. Published by All Rights Reserved to commemorate the debut of KAWS’ 40-meters-long figure placed amidst the quaint backdrop of Mount Fuji; set up at Fujinomiya’s Camping Ground in Shizuoka. A classic KAWS Companion with a relaxing feel. New in a exclusive hard-shell KAWS designed packaging. Medium: Vinyl Year: 2019 Dimensions: 9.4 inches New/unopened; excellent condition. From a sold out edition of unknown. Acquired directly from publisher. Will look fantastic displayed as a shelf piece or hung in its original packaging. KAWS is a fine artist, illustrator, painter, sculptor, product designer, and toymaker. His cartoonish style—including his best-known characters with X-ed out eyes—has its roots in his early career as a street artist, when he began replacing advertisements with his own, masterful acrylic paintings in the early 1990s. Related Categories Takashi Murakami. Banksy. Damien Hirst. Pop Art. Kaws figurative sculpture. Kaws Passing Through. Kaws Resting Place...Category
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- KAWS BFF Vinyl Companions (KAWS Set of 2)By KAWSLocated in NEW YORK, NYKAWS BFF Blue & Pink (set of 2), each new, unopened in original packaging. KAWS BFF is a well-received work and variation of KAWS' large-scale sculpture in Los Angeles's Playa Vista neighborhood. Medium: Vinyl Paint, Cast Resin. Published by Medicom Japan. 2017. 13 x 5.7 x 3.25 inches (applies to each individual). Unopened; excellent condition. From a sold out un-numbered edition. New and sealed in their original packaging. Shipped securely from New York, NY. A leading artist of his generation, Brooklyn-based KAWS engages audiences beyond the museums and galleries in which he regularly exhibits. KAWS is perhaps best known for his iconic character, Companion, which is featured in key paintings, sculptures, products, and toy figures...Category
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- KAWS - Accomplice - Plush, 2023 - Edition of 2000, includes original boxBy KAWSLocated in Dallas, TXThis is a new piece in perfect condition. KAWS is a New York-based artist and designer and one of the most popular living artists, known for his paintings, prints, sculptures, and ...Category
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- Night ShiftBy Guillaume LachapelleLocated in Montreal, QuebecText by Terence Sharpe There is a moment in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) when the character Hari commits suicide by drinking liquid oxygen. As she is not actually a human, but an artificial hybrid product of the mysterious planet and the protagonists’ memories, she heals rapidly and is alive again minutes later. Her choice to take her own life is poignant, seemingly the action of a being becoming aware of its hopeless infinitude. Her realization that while the men will die on the space station or elsewhere, her existence is that of immortality, a deeply alienating notion that causes her to seek her own destruction. The Montreal artist Guillaume Lachapelle has one work that prompts a sense of eternal alienation that echoes Hari’s tragedy. The work greets the viewer with a empty doorway flanked by clinically white bookshelves...Category
2010s Contemporary Figurative Sculptures
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How to Spot a Fake KAWS Figure
KAWS art toys have developed an avid audience in recent decades, and as in any robust collectible market, counterfeiters have followed the mania. Of course, you don’t have to worry about that on 1stDibs, where all our sellers are highly vetted.
KAWS Is Having a Major Effect on Popular Culture, Whether on the Street or in Museums
From graffiti tagger to hypebeast obsession to auction hero — we chart the artist’s rise and his widening influence.