KAWS

KAWS (b. 1974) is an American artist based in New York City. KAWS engages audiences beyond the museums and galleries in which he regularly exhibits. His prolific body of work straddles the worlds of art and design to include paintings, murals, graphic and product design, street art, and large-scale sculptures. Over the last two decades KAWS has built a successful career with work that consistently shows his formal agility as an artist, as well as his underlying wit, irreverence, and affection for our times. His refined graphic language revitalizes figuration with both big, bold gestures and playful intricacies.

Agricola Due Leoni invited KAWS to create an olive oil edition -- a slow-food, carefully handmade product. Agriculture was not too far a stretch for the endlessly curious artist, and our edition features one of his COMPANION figures floating blissfully, or ruefully, whatever the interpretation may be, in a sea of his own making. An image that has been seen in other variants, the project is typical of KAWS' genius at applying a macro-structure pantheon of his own figures and themes to any of the collaborators he works with, in both an entirely controlled and completely liberated way. The work takes the viewer to one more level, a post-Pop, and post-Conceptual use of language and cartoon iconography, operating in real time and on an organic product, in a form that purposefully extends far beyond the visual arts. 

Image courtesy the artist. Photo: Nils Mueller for Wertical