KAWS CLEAN SLATE, 2014. This work is 1 of 3 unique color variants. Now on view at Phillips until the New York 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale on Thursday 15 November.
There's nothing that can compare to being in front of a sculpture that people can walk around and view. It's a totally different thing, experiencing a sculpture.
— Brian Donnelly
Time-lapse video showing the installation of 'CLEAN SLATE' at Phillips New York
Towering over its viewers and animating its surroundings with a uniquely uncanny presence, KAWS' CLEAN SLATE, 2014, comprises the ultimate monument to the artist's trademark Companion figure. Recreated in fiberglass at a colossal scale, the Companion is captured midstride, holding two smaller, cloned child-like versions of itself in its arms as it moves forward with a resolution and confidence that seems to reflect the notion of starting with a "Clean Slate" as its title suggests. Since its unveiling in Hong Kong in 2014 as one of KAWS' largest public sculptures, CLEAN SLATE has taken a prominent position as the artist's most recognizable figure.
Not only was it the first KAWS sculpture of that magnitude to be exhibited in mainland China when it was subsequently erected in Shanghai Times Square in 2015, it was also the key highlight of KAWS' major museum exhibition KAWS: WHERE THE END STARTS, where it was displayed outside of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2016 and 2017. With the figure inspiring the artist to create smaller versions, both for exhibitions at such seminal venues as the Yorkshire Sculpture Park as well as in the form of limited edition toys, it has become a truly global icon of our time that captures the way in which KAWS has irrevocably changed the relationship between fine art and pop culture.
It has been with large-scale sculptures such as the present one that KAWS, aka Brian Donnelly, has in recent years claimed his position among the most forward-looking contemporary sculptors of our present age. Like his artistic idols Claes Oldenburg and Jeff Koons before him, he scales up pop cultural motifs with an irreverent nod to the grand tradition of sculpture. CLEAN SLATE perfectly demonstrates how KAWS re-contextualizes the role of mass culture in art, based as it is on the Companion character that initially took the form of small-scale figurines starting in 1999. KAWS, then largely known as a graffiti provocateur, began collaborating with the Japanese apparel line Bounty Hunter to create a limited edition of vinyl toys. What began as toy versions radically expanded in the past decade to become supersize works of sculpture, deliberately aimed at dismantling distinctions between high and low art.
A bold affront to the classical medium of sculpture, this 25-foot sculpture on view in New York confronts the viewer with a hybrid character that is emblematic of the visual tactic of cartoon appropriation KAWS has become synonymous with. Enacting a sardonic appropriation of arguably the most recognizable cartoon character of all time, Mickey Mouse, KAWS takes on a subject that previously entered art history through the appropriated images of pop artists Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. Yet here the regular reading of the endearing and upbeat cartoon character is disturbed by KAWS' supplanting of the head with his own eerie skull motif; an irreverent decapitation that instantaneously elicits an emotionally weighted sense of the uncanny amongst a familiar audience. The work is at once saccharine and regal.
KAWS conceived of CLEAN SLATE specifically for his second collaboration with Harbour City, Hong Kong's largest shopping mall that had previously hosted his first exhibition in Greater China in 2010. Reflecting on PASSING THROUGH, the work that he had created for the first iteration and featured a seated Companion with its head in his hands, KAWS noted, "I went on a site visit to Kowloon and there was just a sea of people. It's easy to pass people sitting on the street like this all day long – you don't think twice – but when you see something on that scale you might stop and think a little more about what's going on."
A similar case with CLEAN SLATE, KAWS seeks a diverse public to encourage viewers and unsuspecting passersby alike to pause and reflect in the maelstrom of our contemporary age.