Lot 225
Companion (Black)
KAWS (Brian Donnelly) (American, 1974)
2007
Painted cast vinyl, edition of 100
37(L) x 57(W) x 127(H) cm
Estimate
TWD 650,000-850,000
HKD 167,000-219,000
USD 21,500-28,200
Sold Price
TWD 900,000
HKD 233,161
USD 29,910
Signature
Trademark © KAWS,, 07 on the bottom of right feet
MEDICOM TOY 2007, MADE IN CHINA on the bottom of left feet
+ OVERVIEW
KAWS, a Brooklyn-based artist, has created a prolific body of influential work under the Pop Art tradition. The artist’s wide-ranging practices include graphics, paintings, product design, murals and large-scale sculptures. The artist’s large, bright and graphical canvases immaculately rendered in acrylic paint and monumental large-scale fiberglass, bronze, aluminum and wood sculptures often exhibits many replicating imageries that surpass the realms and boundaries of linguistics and culture that transpires between art and commercial design. In retrospect, Brian Donnelly is a native of New Jersey, commonly known as KAWS, whose talent was manifested in the form of graffiti through his passion for skateboard growing up in Jersey City, where he would frequently adorned freight-trains and walls with the pseudonym KAWS as he has a liking for how the formation of these letters worked together cohesively. Upon his graduation from secondary school in 1992, he began to subvert imagery on billboards and public advertisements, he would utilized acrylic paint with no visible brushstrokes in attempts to make his additions appears seamlessly as part of the original advertisement. The artist designed his first vinyl toy Companion in 1999 with Japanese apparel Bounty Hunter and began to make editions as artists such as Tom Wassermann and Claes Oldenburg greatly inspired him at the time. This initial venture garnered much attention in the global art toy community, his prevalence in the commercial sector fostered subsequent collaborations with other labels such as A Bathing Ape, Undercover, Medicom, Santastic in the East and household commercial giants such as Nike, Supreme, Kiehl’s cosmetics, Hennessy and Marc Jacobs from the West.
Modern & Contemporary Asian Art
Ravenel Spring Auction 2017 Taipei
Sunday, June 4, 2017, 2:00pm