Kenny Scharf in ‘KAWS: Art & Comix’ at Albertina Modern
Vienna, Austria
07 May 2026

At Albertina Modern in Vienna, ‘KAWS: Art & Comix’ on view from 3 April to 27 September 2026, explores intersections between contemporary art, comics, and popular culture. The exhibition brings together sculpture, painting, and works on paper to position KAWS within a wider history of artists who have absorbed and reworked comic languages into the language of fine art.

It traces the development of comic and cartoon aesthetics within postwar art, placing KAWS in dialogue with figures such as Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf. The exhibition highlights how these artists challenged distinctions between high and low culture, demonstrating the comic strip’s role as a global visual language capable of addressing broad audiences.

KAWS, who emerged from the 1990s graffiti scene, is recognised for altering advertisements and posters with his distinctive crossed-out eyes motif. His COMPANION figures, rendered in sculpture and painting, convey states of isolation, tenderness, and reflection. Moving between street culture, design, and institutional contexts, his practice reflects the increasing permeability between commercial imagery and contemporary art.

Works on loan from Opera Gallery add to the historical dialogue of the exhibition with Kenny Scharf’s Travel Time (1984) and Untitled (1994). Scharf, associated with the 1980s East Village scene alongside Keith Haring, developed a vibrant, cartoon-inflected visual language. These works extend the exhibition’s narrative, linking earlier experiments in comic-derived painting with KAWS’s contemporary sculptural vocabulary.

‘KAWS: Art & Comix’ positions KAWS within a broader continuum in which comic-derived aesthetics operate as a bridge between mass cultural production and institutional fine art, revealing how humour and commercial imagery can be reframed as contemporary artistic language within the museum context.