KAWS

KAWS’s practice encompasses painting, sculpture, drawing and design, and is marked by a consistent engagement with the visual languages of popular culture. His work often begins with imagery drawn from mass media—animated characters, toys or commercial graphics—which he transforms through a process of simplification and exaggeration into forms that are at once familiar and estranged. Recognizable for their bold outlines, flattened colors and recurring motifs such as crossed-out eyes, these figures move fluidly between disciplines and contexts, from canvases and monumental sculptures to toys and collaborative projects.

Born Brian Donnelly in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1974, KAWS adopted his moniker as a teenager while experimenting with graffiti, drawn to the shapes of the letters themselves. After earning a BFA in illustration from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1996, he worked as a background painter for animated series such as 101 Dalmatians and Doug. Parallel to this, he began a practice of intervening in urban advertisements, subtly reworking commercial posters with his own characters before returning them to the streets. This combination of studio training, professional animation and subversive street art would form the foundation of his multifaceted career.

Ambiguity and duality are central to KAWS’s practice, which often revolves around the reimagining of familiar cartoon figures. Characters such as COMPANION, CHUM and BFF draw on icons of popular culture, but are recast with his signature motifs—crossed-out eyes, rounded skulls and exaggerated gestures. These figures occupy a space between playfulness and melancholy, suggesting both comfort and unease. By reshaping images from mass media into new forms, KAWS creates works that reflect the emotional range of contemporary life while also questioning the boundaries between commercial imagery and fine art.

KAWS has exhibited widely at institutions around the world, with solo shows at the Brooklyn Museum, New York (2015, 2021), the Serpentine Gallery, London (2022), the Mori Arts Center Gallery, Tokyo (2021), and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2019), among others. More recently, his work has been presented at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (2024), and the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York (2024). Alongside these institutional projects, he has developed large-scale public works, including a balloon for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2012 and a 115-foot inflatable sculpture that floated in Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong, in 2019. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.