Footnotes

Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner in 1998

Exhibited
New York, bOb Bar, KAWS: Me vs Them, 1998


Witty, provocative, and sophisticatedly playful, the bold and brash imagery of international contemporary artist KAWS (the nom de guerre of Brian Donnelly) is undeniably iconic and instantly recognisable. From the cartoon-like figures with X-ed out eyes through to the appropriation of such recognisable cultural icons including the Simpsons, the Michelin Man and Elmo, to name but a few, KAWS has created a body of work that is comparable to the likes of Jeff Koons, Takeshi Murakami, or Damien Hirst – period-defining superstars whose work has spanned an enormous breadth of media and captivated audiences around the world. A street artist who has risen to become one of the most celebrated contemporary artists of his day, KAWS' indoctrination into the fold of blue-chip artists has reached a new high, currently honoured with a mid-career retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, New York.

Beginning his career as an illustrator and street artist in the early 1990s, roving the busy streets of New Jersey and Manhattan in his youth, Donnelly graffiti-bombed buildings and trains with his notorious KAWS tag. Like many street artists who have graduated to the realm of contemporary art, including Banksy, STIK, and Blek Le Rat, his pseudonym has become inseparably tethered to the aesthetic and motifs of his practice – becoming a fully-formed identity that is impactful and unique. Tagging the urban landscape, however, was not enough for the young artist who soon began to apply his iconography to street-furniture and bus-shelter advertisements. This diversion from the street-art norm was a catalyst for the artist, engaging in a dialogue with the brand names and faces of fashion and photography that plastered the trendy streets of Manhattan.

Working quickly and effectively, the artist removed the original posters and replaced them with the versions that featured his now iconic cartoon-like figures, drastically altering the message and aesthetic of the existing adverts. Archival footage exists of KAWS appending his banners to shopfront displays in mere seconds, before disappearing into the crowd. In the teeming streets of a bustling metropolis like New York City, his imagery reached an enormous audience; and yet the vast majority of the public were unaware of any difference to these mass-produced adverts that lined the streets. KAWS' pictures infiltrated and fed stealthily into the landscape of the city, becoming part of the genetic code of the urban sprawl. The artist's quiet rebellion has exploded to become a global phenomenon in little more than a decade, from these pivotal beginnings, rearranging the characters of adverts, to floating a monumental, inflatable 'companion' in Hong Kong's Victoria Harbour in 2019.

Untitled from 1997 is a superb example of one of KAWS' early 'subvertising' works. In the present painting, American actor Ellen Barkin is featured on the cover of US Weekly magazine, a source of celebrity gossip and entertainment. Scantily clad with her arms crossed over her chest, Barkin is a symbol of popular culture – the glamourised queen of public interest. Here, KAWS obscures the figure's face in his trademark skull and bones, the serpentine body wrapping around Barkin's torso in a seemingly loving embrace. Somewhat uniquely in such a work, we see the fastidious sculpting of paint here, building a gorgeously three-dimensional sense of one of his 'companion' creatures that are so often rendered in a flat cartoonish style.

Rather than viewing it as a defacement of these advertisements, KAWS' imposed collaborations with the original photographers – many of whom he admired – should be viewed as a type of cumulative cultural interface; what is the product of high fashion and low tabloid fodder alike, becomes the artistic underpinnings for the street artist. In this vein, the artist elaborates: 'When I started painting on advertisements, it occurred to me that the ad really set the work in a specific time. You could look at a dozen walls and an untrained eye might not be able to distinguish the difference between the 80s and 90s. When you paint over ads, it clicks especially with the phone booths I was doing. There was these Calvin Klein ads of Kate Moss or Christy Turlington. I think that is when I realized it was more about communication. There was a dialogue to it' (the artist in: Tobey Maguire, 'KAWS', Interview Magazine, 27 April 2010, online).

One of the most significant artists to inherit the mantle of Pop Art, the artist's use of pop culture icons, the slick surfaces of advertising and editorial material, as well as his own collaborative work with fashion houses, has constructed a bold but subtle critique of consumerism. KAWS collaborative work began with the Japanese company Bounty Hunger, creating his first toy, a vinyl figure of Mickey Mouse with his famed X-ed out eyes. KAWS has since produced a large variation of toys and figurines with his graphic motifs. Immensely popular, transcending the world of traditional fine arts, these mass-produced pieces have a flavour of Andy Warhol's factory to them, producing works on the scale of a commercial enterprise of mass production.

A superlative, unique work, originally exhibited in one of KAWS' earliest exhibitions at bOb Bar on the Lower East Side in 1998, this Untitled painting comes to market as one of the artist's early and important 'subvertising' works; such examples are incredibly rare and highly sought-after by collectors. Acquired directly from the artist at this underground exhibition, it has remained in the same private collection ever since and is a supremely significant work by one of the most influential and recognisable contemporary artists of his generation.