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拍品專文
UNTITLED, an example of KAWS’s transformative and arresting style of painting, renders a cropped image of the classic cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants into a multicolored composition that begins to approach abstraction. At once instantly recognizable to those familiar with the character and utterly transformed, the painting reconciles the artist’s visual heritage—influenced by artists like Peter Saul and Claes Oldenburg—with his beginnings as a graffiti writer in and around his hometown of Jersey City, New Jersey. Now classed as one of the foremost painters of his generation, KAWS is revered for his meticulous craftsmanship, self-referential formal vocabulary, and reinterpretation of American pop-culture. Part of KAWS @ PAFA, the artist’s historic intervention at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Art–the first of its kind at the celebrated museum–the painting was included in a salon-style wall of KAWS paintings, hung opposite a similarly hung wall consisting of works from the museum’s collection. More than a just deeply compelling, tightly composed example of his work, the present painting hails from one of KAWS’s most important exhibitions to date, lending it a quiet sense of prominence in his oeuvre.
Pop culture has long been a source of inspiration for KAWS, and helped catapult his work into the artistic mainstream. Beginning his career as a graffiti artist in and around Jersey City, KAWS achieved notoriety by painting his now-beloved Companion faces on bus shelter fashion advertisements. Editing these boilerplate advertisements and roping them into his artistic world, the then-mysterious painter became known a poignant commentator on the nature of mass consumption and the American fascination with celebrity and celebrities, both real and fictional. Untitled continues in this tradition: by removing SpongeBob’s most essential elements—recognizable shape and color—KAWS calls into question the source of his appeal and cultural permanence.
Depicting the widely beloved cartoon sponge in a state of apparent anger or annoyance, this painting crops and re-colors its source. SpongeBob’s typical yellow is replaced by a dusky purple, his white buckteeth become lime green, his eyelids a darker, eggplant purple and his pupils, marked by the artist’s trademark X’s, are red and blue-grey, respectively. Compositionally, the picture denies viewers the entirety of the character’s face, instead offering a zoomed-in portrait from his eyelids to the upper part of his mouth. Thus, one of the most recognizable and marketed characters of the last twenty years becomes a ghoulish, grimacing figure, altered to a state of near-abstraction by the painter’s wild but keenly considered colors. In KAWS’s singular visual parlance, pop-culture sources serve as respected fodder—liable to be adorned with X’s over their eyes, re-colorations of their skin or a number of other KAWSian edits. As such, the artist emerges as a deft interpreter of contemporary culture and a powerful arbiter of its most salient characters and, perhaps, its underlying taboos.
Describing the origin of SpongeBob in his work, KAWS states, “I started doing SpongeBob paintings for Pharrell. Then I started doing smaller paintings, which got much more abstract. And SpongeBob was something I wanted to do because graphically I love the shapes” (KAWS in conversation with Tobey Maguire, "KAWS," Interview Magazine, May 19, 2010). Indeed, the work reflects his statement, with its focus on line and color which works to reduce SpongeBob to a series of connected shapes, stripping away his famous happy-go-lucky persona in the process. Likewise, on the nature of abstraction versus representation, he asks, “[w]hat’s abstraction to somebody that knows something? 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 interviewed in "KAWS On Man's Best Friend at Honor Fraser," The Hundreds, September 16, 2014.) Whereas a common first reaction to abstraction is an attempt at parsing some concrete imagery, KAWS does the opposite, urging viewers to find abstraction in icons they’ve known for years. Tellingly, he mentions this impulse in relation to the history of painting, which, as part of his KAWS @ PAFA project, he engaged with a deep enthusiasm.
Staged in 2013, KAWS @ PAFA brought the contemporary painter into a rich and multifaceted dialogue with the museum’s world-class collections of painting and sculpture, as well as its historic Victorian Gothic architecture. Producing over 40 unique works for the exhibition, many of them site-specific, KAWS transformed the museum into a universe of his own devising. Life-size Companion sculptures stood guard in front of a huge neoclassical canvas by Benjamin West, while a jet-black Chum–KAWS’s take on the iconic Michelin Man–found itself flanked by 19th century busts of Benjamin Franklin and the Marquis de Lafayette. The present work was originally situated among dozens of other paintings, all based on his Spongebob motif, which, cropped and re-colored, depict the typically jovial character in various states of fear, sadness, and anger. Referencing the typical preference of museums until the early 20th century, the salon style hanging furthers the show’s central premise of uniting a contemporary American practice with a historic collection of American art. A powerful and emblematic painting, Untitled is a product of the artist’s prolonged investigation into the qualities and often arbitrary classifications of painting.
Pop culture has long been a source of inspiration for KAWS, and helped catapult his work into the artistic mainstream. Beginning his career as a graffiti artist in and around Jersey City, KAWS achieved notoriety by painting his now-beloved Companion faces on bus shelter fashion advertisements. Editing these boilerplate advertisements and roping them into his artistic world, the then-mysterious painter became known a poignant commentator on the nature of mass consumption and the American fascination with celebrity and celebrities, both real and fictional. Untitled continues in this tradition: by removing SpongeBob’s most essential elements—recognizable shape and color—KAWS calls into question the source of his appeal and cultural permanence.
Depicting the widely beloved cartoon sponge in a state of apparent anger or annoyance, this painting crops and re-colors its source. SpongeBob’s typical yellow is replaced by a dusky purple, his white buckteeth become lime green, his eyelids a darker, eggplant purple and his pupils, marked by the artist’s trademark X’s, are red and blue-grey, respectively. Compositionally, the picture denies viewers the entirety of the character’s face, instead offering a zoomed-in portrait from his eyelids to the upper part of his mouth. Thus, one of the most recognizable and marketed characters of the last twenty years becomes a ghoulish, grimacing figure, altered to a state of near-abstraction by the painter’s wild but keenly considered colors. In KAWS’s singular visual parlance, pop-culture sources serve as respected fodder—liable to be adorned with X’s over their eyes, re-colorations of their skin or a number of other KAWSian edits. As such, the artist emerges as a deft interpreter of contemporary culture and a powerful arbiter of its most salient characters and, perhaps, its underlying taboos.
Describing the origin of SpongeBob in his work, KAWS states, “I started doing SpongeBob paintings for Pharrell. Then I started doing smaller paintings, which got much more abstract. And SpongeBob was something I wanted to do because graphically I love the shapes” (KAWS in conversation with Tobey Maguire, "KAWS," Interview Magazine, May 19, 2010). Indeed, the work reflects his statement, with its focus on line and color which works to reduce SpongeBob to a series of connected shapes, stripping away his famous happy-go-lucky persona in the process. Likewise, on the nature of abstraction versus representation, he asks, “[w]hat’s abstraction to somebody that knows something? 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 interviewed in "KAWS On Man's Best Friend at Honor Fraser," The Hundreds, September 16, 2014.) Whereas a common first reaction to abstraction is an attempt at parsing some concrete imagery, KAWS does the opposite, urging viewers to find abstraction in icons they’ve known for years. Tellingly, he mentions this impulse in relation to the history of painting, which, as part of his KAWS @ PAFA project, he engaged with a deep enthusiasm.
Staged in 2013, KAWS @ PAFA brought the contemporary painter into a rich and multifaceted dialogue with the museum’s world-class collections of painting and sculpture, as well as its historic Victorian Gothic architecture. Producing over 40 unique works for the exhibition, many of them site-specific, KAWS transformed the museum into a universe of his own devising. Life-size Companion sculptures stood guard in front of a huge neoclassical canvas by Benjamin West, while a jet-black Chum–KAWS’s take on the iconic Michelin Man–found itself flanked by 19th century busts of Benjamin Franklin and the Marquis de Lafayette. The present work was originally situated among dozens of other paintings, all based on his Spongebob motif, which, cropped and re-colored, depict the typically jovial character in various states of fear, sadness, and anger. Referencing the typical preference of museums until the early 20th century, the salon style hanging furthers the show’s central premise of uniting a contemporary American practice with a historic collection of American art. A powerful and emblematic painting, Untitled is a product of the artist’s prolonged investigation into the qualities and often arbitrary classifications of painting.