KAWS ART EXHIBITION

The High Museum of Art will premiere a major multi-site exhibition of work by KAWS opening to the public on February 18, 2012.  The exhibition features a 22-foot-high, site-specific mural painted in the Margaretta Taylor Lobby of the High’s Wieland Pavilion and a 24-foot-long triptych hung in the Museum’s Robinson Atrium. In addition, the exhibition will include three new major works including a grid of 27 round paintings, a group of KAWS toys, drawings, and a collaborative project with British Photographer David Sims.

The exhibition will also include KAWS’s monumental sculpture Companion (2010), which was installed on November 18, 2011 on the Museum’s piazza, in advance of the main exhibition opening in February.

KAWS: DOWN TIME has been organized exclusively for the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, by the High’s Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Michael Rooks. The exhibition will coincide with a public program featuring KAWS and Michael Rooks in conversation at the Alliance Theatre. The program starts at 7 p.m. on Thursday, February 16, as part of the High’s Conversations with Contemporary Artists lecture series.

EXHIBITION LINK

Brian Donnelly, a.k.a. KAWS, emerged as a street artist in the early 1990s, painting his moniker on walls and billboards in and around Jersey City and New York City. In the mid-1990s he began modifying advertisements in bus shelters and on phone booths with paintings of his emblematic skull-and-crossbones motif. He continued to develop this image for the next few years, conducting guerilla interventions on advertisements in bus shelters and phone booths not only in New York City, but also Paris, London, Berlin and Tokyo.

This work led to direct collaborations with the commercial photographers and designers who produced the original ads and has been featured in numerous publications. It was exhibited most recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, as part of the groundbreaking exhibition Art In The Streets. KAWS studied at The School of Visual Arts in New York City and currently lives in Brooklyn. His work has been exhibited internationally in Japan, France, Spain and The Netherlands. KAWS is represented by Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, and Galerie Perrotin, Paris.