KAWS is the working name of Brian Donnelly, an American artist born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1974. He started as a graffiti writer and spent the 1990s repainting advertisements in New York bus shelters and phone booths.
He became famous for Companion, a Mickey Mouse-like figure with a skull for a head and X's for eyes, which he has turned into toys and giant sculptures. In 2019 one of his paintings sold for about 14.8 million dollars.
Most people first meet his work as a toy, a hoodie or a giant balloon. It began with stolen posters, slipped out of locked displays on the streets of New York.
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Shortly after Donnelly moved to Manhattan to study art, a friend handed him a key that opened the glass cases of phone booths and bus shelters, the frames where advertising posters sit behind a pane.
He lifted out the ads, took them home and painted his own characters over the models. Days later he slid them back behind the glass, sometimes in another neighborhood, and left them for commuters to find.
He signed each one discreetly in black. Nobody had commissioned these pictures, yet people noticed, and collectors began prying the panels loose to keep them.
The auction rooms came much later. In April 2019, at the auction house Sotheby's in Hong Kong, a painting by Donnelly sold for nearly fifteen times its high estimate. And Companion, the figure behind all of it, had been born far from New York.
A name made of letters
Before Companion and before the posters, there were four letters, chosen by a teenage graffiti writer in Jersey City. Asked what K, A, W and S stand for, Donnelly gives an answer few people expect.
What You'll Discover
What his name really stands for.
Who handed him the key.
Where Companion first appeared.
Who ordered the record painting.
Why a giant lay down in Hong Kong.