Kaws visits Miami

[Tier0club.com]

Saturday, September 20, 2008 was a special day. It was the day that I got to meet the Andy Warhol of our time, Brian Donnelley also known as KAWS1 at his Miami Saturated opening.
'Saturated' is the first show of its kind in Miami. The exhibit opened on September 20th and will run until November 15, on the second floor of the Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in downtown Miami. Kaws was there for the grand opening and posed for pictures, although he is a very quiet and reserved regular guy. It featured eleven pieces, four of which belong to 'curator' Pharrell Williams. Of the eleven, eight were a theme series of a Sponge Bob-like character with the signature x'ed out eyes. The other three were 'Kurfs', Kaws' take on the Smurfs. All paintings were one of a kind pieces, unlike the well dresses crowd that attended who looked as if they were sponsored by Supreme.

If you don’t know who Kaws is, Kaws was born Brian Donnelley in Jersey City, new jersey 1974. He noticed art was his calling in the fifth grade when his teacher told his mother that maybe he should pursue art. He began doing graffiti as early as seventh grade and by 1992, during his last two years of high school; he was painting full-on walls and billboards with NYC graffiti crew FC and TC5. Kaws was doing his own style of full pieces right over the top of billboard ads. He was given a key to open phone booths and bus stop ads which helped paint a larger variety of ad posters when he moved to Manhattan in 96.

Kaws received his Bachelors in Fine Art from The School of Visual Arts in NYC. He got work straight out of college working for a company called Jumbo Pictures, which Disney bought out, and ended up painting backgrounds for Disney. During that time, he worked on many pop culture staples, such as the 101 Dalmatians TV series, the MTV animated series Daria, in which he painted cells. Best of all he worked on the Doug show.
Kaws moved away from his current work with an artist grant he received from Pernod liquor in 1998. He went to Tokyo and worked with Hectic, then he meets Nigo, who asked him to start doing commission pieces. He also met Hikaru Iwanaga from Bounty Hunter who introduced him to designer art toys. After 9/11, Nigo had Kaws start designing for A Bathing Ape. Also, through working with Medicom and Wonderwall he opened his own lifestyle shop called OriginalFake in Japan.


Contributed by Tier0Club.com member Jay Will
www.tier0club.com

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[MLina M]

I read that some of the paintings have been stolen from the gallery.
Can't imagine someone walking down the street with a giant spongebob painting, ha!
mm