We meet KAWS aka Brian Donnelly to discuss his three major institutional exhibitions all opening in 2024. The first show has just opened at The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh and is the first time that Donnelly's work has been aligned with Warhol. Followed by the Parrish Art Museum this summer, and The Drawing Center, set to open in Autumn.
In celebration of its 30th anniversary, The Warhol presents KAWS + Warhol, the first exhibition to examine the dark themes present in the work of both artists. From skulls to car crashes, both artists deploy their signature bright colors and pop culture references while also presenting the lurid spectacle of death. The dark undercurrents in the work of KAWS and Warhol are magnified and brought into plain sight by presenting the two artists together for the first time.
KAWS will also respond to Warhol’s embrace of commercialism by presenting a new series of paintings, sculptures, and installations related to his recent commission with General Mills which inserted his signature characters into the packaging for some of America’s most loved cereal boxes including Reese’s Puffs, Count Chocula, and Boo-Berry. The cereal works will be juxtaposed with Warhol’s iconic Brillo Boxes and his lesser-known series of paintings for children.
In response to The Warhol’s new initiative The Pop District, KAWS will also present a monumental wooden sculpture in Pop Park, directly across from the museum and visible from its entrance space.
In July, The Parrish Art Museum will be presenting a major solo exhibition devoted to the artist KAWS, including a wide array of sculptures and paintings. This exhibition marks the first KAWS survey on the East End of Long Island.
In October, The Drawing Center, New York will open ‘The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection Since’. Since the mid 1990s, the artist KAWS (Brian Donnelly) has collected over 3,000 works on paper by a wide variety of artists, ranging from Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning to graffiti writer Dondi. His collection is particularly rich in drawings by self-taught artists, historical and contemporary, comic artists, and graffiti artists. It contains masterpieces by Adolf Wölfli, Martín Ramírez and Helen Rae, extraordinary sketchbooks pages by legendary graffiti writers like Lee Quiñones, comics by Robert Crumb and Rick Griffin, and a cache of drawings by Chicago Imagist artists including Jim Nutt, and Gladys Nilsson, among many others. For this exhibition, KAWS will curate a selection of more than two hundred drawings from his collection in an exhibition of his own design that will occupy the entirety of The Drawing Center’s gallery spaces.
Follow @KAWS on Instagram.
This is our second episode with KAWS and we strongly recommend you visit his 3 exhibitions in 2024. Learn more @TalkArt
Visit KAWS x WARHOL, now open: https://www.warhol.org/exhibition/kaws-warhol/
Visit KAWS X Drawing Center, from October 2024: https://drawingcenter.org/exhibitions/kaws-collection
Visit KAWS x Parrish Art Museum, from July 2024: https://parrishart.org/exhibitions/kaws/
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