KAWS
Painted over bus-shelter advertising in the 1990s, and turned a crossed-out cartoon into a global market.
KAWS is Brian Donnelly, born in Jersey City in 1974, who worked in animation before altering the advertisements inside New York and Tokyo bus shelters and phone boxes, adding crossed-out eyes and a skull-like head to the models. From that came the Companion — a Mickey-derived figure with X eyes and gloved hands — and a body of work that has run simultaneously through painting, monumental sculpture, vinyl toys and collaborations with Uniqlo, Nike, Dior and the Japanese label Bounty Hunter. A forty-metre Companion floated in Hong Kong harbour in 2019.
The tiers here are wide and are routinely confused. Unique paintings on canvas lead, followed by large fibreglass and bronze sculpture in small editions, then vinyl and resin figures in editions of a few hundred to several thousand, then Uniqlo product and open-edition prints. Original box, tags and certificate are a substantial part of the value of the figures. Counterfeit vinyls are widespread and often good. The intercepted advertisement pieces from the 1990s are scarce and require proper provenance, as do the Bus Shelter works still in their original frames.
If you own a work by KAWS
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.