“If you look at something but then you know what it is, is it still abstraction? You just start looking at the gestures and how they work and thinking about the history of painting and how it can relate to that”
—KAWS
After his graduation from the School of Visual Arts in New York, KAWS started his creative career working for Jumbo Pictures as an animator, painting backgrounds for Disney’s animated series. While thriving in this artistic environment, the artist chased creative liberty and the freedom to produce his own work. Like his predecessors Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, KAWS turned to his urban surroundings and filled the streets of New York City with his own graffiti in the 1990s. It was here that he developed his unique visual lexicon and formed the signature symbols for which he is so well-known today.
Reworking advertisements with over-painting and spray-painting, and drawing from the nostalgia of cherished cartoon heroes and their universal cultural value, KAWS created his most well-known characters: Companion and Bendy, as well as his signature ‘XX’ trademark. In designing his own era-specific cartoons, KAWS magnifies and distorts animated portraits, stripping them of comforting familiarity. The result is entirely new entities infused with a witty contemporary discourse depicted in neon colours that demand attention.
In NO REPLY, the artist crops into his beloved characters’ features, showing only portions of their faces and hands. By including his X-shaped eyes in nine of the ten prints, KAWS ensures that even the most abstract designs are recognizable. While only segments of each character are visible, the vibrant colours and cropped compositions pulsate with energy and movement, as if the figures are attempting to escape their frames.
