136 SEPTEMBER 2019
After dabbling with animation paint, a medium he still
uses today, Donnelly gained prominence for his take on
‘subvertising’ in New York City. At night he would
remove brand ads from the likes of Calvin Klein and
Guess from bus shelters, telephone boxes and even
billboards, take them back to his family home, then
customise them with his own illustrations before posting
them in areas of his choosing.
“I started to realise the parallels between graffiti and
advertising and just communication in general – how to
reach people,” Donnelly remembers. “I thought the ads
were a great vehicle to get work out there. A lot of people
thought it was anti-advertising, anti-establishment. For me
it was more about just existing in my environment and
taking these larger things and making them my own.”
His reworked ads became so popular that people started
stealing them. Even now, an original will emerge at auction
and Donnelly does his best to buy those back.
By the late 90s, he’d moved into 3D, creating his first
Kaws’s toy, calledCompanion– now a regular fixture of his
work – with Tokyo-based company Bounty Hunter, after a
trip to Japan. With its oversized head, crosses for eyes and
Mickey Mouse-style body, Companionhas appeared in
painting, sculpture and even caused New York’s Museum
of Modern Art website to crash after a limited-edition
figurine went on sale in 2017.
“When you’re young, it’s not like people are telling you
how to do things. It’s not like you even know who to ask or
what to ask,” Donnelly says of his unconventional career
path. “So when you find yourself in this situation where
you can make something you’ve never made before ... it
blows your mind. What else can you make? What if you
could do itthisbig? Or what if it’s real?”
Jumping from medium to medium and fusing art with
commerce has become a common thread. Since the early
2000s the Kaws name has been lent to Nike and Marc
Jacobs for footwear, Comme des Garçons, Kiehl’s for
beauty, and album cover art for Kanye West. As an artist
Donnelly has worked with giant inflatables (after
creating a four-metre tall Companion for the Macy’s
Thanksgiving Parade in 2012), become proficient in
sculpture and enjoyed a stint mashing up cartoon
characters fromThe Smurfs,SpongeBob SquarePantsand
The Simpsons(which he callsThe Kimpsons).
It was a painting of the latter (titledThe Kaws Album)
that was responsible for the record-breaking auction
earlier this year. Riffing off the cover art from the Beatles’s
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Bandalbum but using the
cast fromThe Simpsons, it was sold by its owner for more
than 15 times what Sotheby’s had expected. While
Donnelly won’t be drawn on who dropped more than A$20 million for the piece (“It
was just a collector and they texted me straight after”), speculation was rife that the
buyer was Justin Beiber, because the singer posted a shot of the painting soon after.
“I think anybody who tells you they weren’t surprised is lying,” Donnelly says of
the sale. “But it’s not as though I feel I have any part in it. I feel like I’m looking at it
like everyone else, and being like: ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’” While many artists would
have been happy with the windfall, Donnelly says he “wasn’t so thrilled” – because
the sale happened straight after he sent a 37-metre-long inflatableCompanionfigure
down Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong as part of a new exhibition. “I had just done
that piece in the water and everything went well on that project and we got everyone
covering it – news stations and CNN; it was on the front page of newspapers. So
I was on a high and then the auction happened and I was just like: ‘Blergh.’“Istarted to
realise the
parallels
bet ween
graffiti and
adver tising ...
how to reach
people. I
thought the
ads were a
great vehicle
to get work
out there”