He was born in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1974 and received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. From its onset, his career has been marked by his ability to cross disciplines’ boundaries and push our conceptions of what an artist, artwork, exhibition, collector, and audience can be. His extensive list of projects in renowned institutions include solo exhibitions at— The Mori Arts Center Gallery, Tokyo (2021), The Brooklyn Museum, New York (2021); The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2019); Fire Station, Qatar Museums, Doha, Qatar (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Michigan (2019), Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis , Missouri (2017); Modern Art Museum
of Fort Worth, Texas (2016) which travelled to the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2017); Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Longside Gallery, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom (2016) ; Brooklyn Museum, New York (2015); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Málaga, Spain (2014); Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas (2013); Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia (2013); High Art Museum, Atlanta, Georgia (2011); and Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2011). The timing somehow seems perfect even though we started planning it well before the pandemic. It feels like an accomplishment to organize and open an exhibition under these circumstances. I’m very thankful to my studio and everyone at the museum for the work they put in during these challenging times.”

The exhibit starts with a life-sized pink sculpture of his Chum character, which is inspired by the Michelin Man, then goes into a room that shows his old notebooks, photos of his early graffiti tags. It segues into his 1990s ad-busting photos onto bus stop ads and shows a series of paintings featuring altered pop culture figures from The Simpsons, SpongeBob SquarePants, Snoopy and the Smurfs, all of which have X-ed out eyes. KAWS: Companionship in the Age of Loneliness is a major contribution to the growing international reputation of this contemporary artist. It follows KAWS’s recent solo presentations at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2016), the Yuz Museum Shanghai and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2017) and the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Foundation (2019). This exhibition introduces audiences to the full range of KAWS’s artistic output, including a newly commissioned monumental sculpture (his largest bronze sculpture to date), paintings reworking pop-culture figures and an impressive collection of human-scale sculptural figures. KAWS’s collaborations with other artists will be explored in the exhibition and those with major brands on display in the dedicated pop-up shop along with his own products. The first of KAWS’s larger sculptures was produced in 2006 to greet visitors to a shop dedicated to his own fashion and design label, OriginalFake. COMPANION (ORIGINAL FAKE), 2011, with one half of its body dissected to reveal its internal anatomy. I’m pleased to be exclusively launching my new Phaidon Contemporary Artist Series book with my longtime partner Uniqlo,” said Brian Donnelly, the artist behind KAWS, in a statement. “To celebrate the occasion, I designed a small capsule collection of T-shirts and sweatshirts that will be available for a limited time.”He includes early work in this exhibition that traces his roots, the sort of stuff that typically is not seen as high art today. “I’m happy I have sketch books and pictures of graffiti walls from the early 1990s in the show, so many people put that stuff away or say, ‘This is the point where I became a professional artist,’” he said. “But that whole time when I was painting walls and freight trains, that was painting. I was thinking about visual compositions in terms of color and scale, things I think about now.” Claes Oldenburg has made many great public artworks, as well as smaller, more intimate objects and editions,” said Donnelly. “His use of scale to distort the viewers relationship to the work, as well as his choice of materials, was absolutely brilliant.”

A virtual recreation of the show is available in Fortnite, allowing millions of players from all over the world to experience the exhibition from anywhere. All built by the Fornite Creative community, players will be able to explore the Serpentine gardens, interact with KAWS’ artworks and experience his iconic sculptures in a completely new way. Two years later, taking on another Captain Morgan billboard—one that incorporated the look of graffiti - his tag appeared in large amber letters that harmonized with the liquor in the bottle held by the captain. It was in 1996, tagging a billboard advertising Marlboro cigarettes, that KAWS began to work deliberately with the content of the advertisement as a form of critique and commentary.” Immediately after graduating, KAWS took a post at an animation studio, and used leftover acrylic paint from his day job to create these flawless images. In many cases he added the skull-and-crossbones to the faces of the models featured, introducing the public to some of his now-familiar characters for the first time. Today, art collectors across the world part with huge amounts to own a work by KAWS, the artist and subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. However, this wasn’t always the case. In our new book, KAWS: WHAT PARTY, the Brooklyn Museum’s curator, Eugenie Tsai explains how the artist, real name Brian Donnelly, first came to wider attention with a series of uninvited interventions into our visual environment.In glass vitrines, there are countless figurines and toys (including his Kaws MTV Moonman from 2013, which was used for the MTV Video Music awards and held in the hands of winners like Justin Timberlake), as well as his designs for Comme des Garçons wallets and Vans sneakers. In addition to the Fortnite collaboration, Serpentine and KAWS will use an app developed by Acute Art to offer a bridge between the virtual and the physical worlds. All the paintings and sculptures in the exhibition as well as a miniature version of the entire show will exist as AR works on the Acute Art app and can be placed and viewed at home by viewers globally. They can also be shared on social media, making KAWS’ art visible across the world. ACUTE ART APP One groundbreaking piece is themed around his experience of getting Covid-19. The piece, entitled Urge (Kub2) was created in 2020, and details the artist’s interpretation of being in bed for three weeks with the virus. It shows his Chum character, having different colored paws over his torso and face, signifying “touching and contaminating”, said the artist. Original Story: After the release of their 2019 collaboration caused absolute pandemonium at a mall in China, KAWS and UNIQLO have announced they’ll be feeding the fan frenzy once more with an all-new collaborative collection.