KAWS: the former graffiti artist turned global pop art star shows off his collector’s eye

Most who hear the name KAWS immediately think of his signature cartoony characters with Xs instead of eyes, which have appeared in fashion ads and on T-shirts, as outsized inflatable sculptures and as a hugely popular line of collectable toys. The name is based on the graffiti tag used in the 1990s by the artist Brian Donnelly, who started spray painting as a teenager on the streets of New Jersey and, after graduating with a degree in illustration from the School of Visual Arts in New York, worked for a time in an animation studio. Over the past decade, KAWS has become internationally famous, and his work has been compared to Andy Warhol’s for the way it blurs the lines around pop culture and art, commercialism and conceptualism. In fact, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh is currently hosting a joint exhibition that explores the darker themes of violence and death found in the work of both KAWS and Warhol. And a blockbuster show of the artist’s family of characters is travelling from the Art Gallery of Ontario, which organised it, to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville next year. Meanwhile, his New York dealer Skarstedt opened...