Drawing from Pop and Neo-Pop traditions, KAWS’s work straddles the line between fine art and popular culture, crossing the mediums of painting, sculpture, and printmaking, along with fashion, merchandise, and vinyl toys. This book, made in close collaboration with the artist, captures his exciting talent as never before, presenting work from across his career and exploring his unique ability to reshape the ways we think about contemporary art and culture today.
Includes photography of the KAWS: WHAT PARTY installation at Brooklyn Museum, available late June 2021 in five different covers.
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Daniel Birnbaum is an art critic, curator, and director of Acute Art, a virtual and augmented reality production company.
Eugenie Tsai is John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator, Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum.
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For twenty-five years, Brooklyn-based artist KAWS (Brian Donnelly, American, born 1974) has bridged the worlds of art, popular culture, and commerce. Adapting the rules of cultural production and consumption in the twenty-first century, his practice both critiques and participates in consumer culture. KAWS: WHAT PARTY is a sweeping survey featuring more than one hundred broad-ranging works, such as rarely seen graffiti drawings and notebooks, paintings and sculptures, smaller collectibles, furniture, and monumental installations of his popular COMPANION figures. It also features new pieces made uniquely for the exhibition along with his early-career altered advertisements.
