Multidisciplinary artist KAWS first became known for his work as a graffiti artist and stencil art on bus shelters and telephone booths. This coffee table book grants a lively look at the celebrated artist and designer KAWS. The monograph is the first comprehensive survey of the well-known and celebrated artist's oeuvre.
KAWS is the pseudonym of Brian Donnelly, the American designer and graffiti artist. He placed the four letters under his "tags" on the streets of New York. In the 1990s, he attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and worked as an illustrator for Disney. At night, he was a graffiti artist, creating parodies of existing advertisements on bus shelters, phone booths and billboards. He made his first three-dimensional vinyl toy in 1999. This Companion, with a round belly and white gloves, became an indispensable piece of jewelry among streetwear enthusiasts. Characters like Chum, Bendy and Blitz, and renditions of iconic cartoons like Pinocchio, Snoopy and Tweety followed. Hello Kitty was not missing either.
Often his sculptures, dying in certain editions, were sold out within a few intervals. This included a crashed site at the Museum of Modern Art. The toy line expanded rapidly; not only in number and color, but also in style, size and collaborations such as Dior, Louis Vuitton and Kanye West.
KAWS walks the lines between art and commercial activity, and so good parallels are drawn with Andy Warhol. The prices of his objects vary widely: from fifteen dollars for a keychain to over fourteen million for a painting.
Specifications
Title: KAWS
Author: Monica Ramirez-Montagut
Publisher: Rizzoli
Size 227 x 285 x 28 mm
Size: 256 pages
Weight: 1508 grams
Language: English
Material: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780847834341
