Stay Steady
KAWS
KAWS is a graffiti artist, illustrator, painter, sculptor, product designer, and toymaker. His early career as a street artist, informed his style particularly when he began replacing advertisements with his own with acrylic paintings in the early 1990s. Since then KAWS has embraced the accessible mass media influence of the Pop Art Movement and the commercialist spirit of Claes Oldenburg and Takashi Murakami. He merges the distinction between products and art objects, as he creates limited edition prints and toys and designs pop culture consumer products from Kanye West album covers to Nike sneakers. He has also received great attention from his fine art acrylic paintings and large sculptures.
This artwork is part of an edition print of snoopy inspired triptyich, No One’s Home, Stay Steady, The Things That Comfort, created in 2015. Using his Snoopy motif here, KAWS fills the cartoon icon with the same “x” shapes, teeth, and eyes used throughout his works. Since 1995, KAWS has incorporated Snoopy into every aspect of his artistic practice. He began by graffiti tagging Peanuts characters on a MetLife billboard in New Jersey. Later, he released vinyl toys of Snoopy and Woodstock, debuted limited edition prints at Art Basel in Miami Beach, and partnered with Uniqlo to design a collection of Peanuts clothing. KAWS’s fascination with Snoopy began at a young age. He says of the Snoopy Charles Schutz’s comic strip “I think Peanuts is part of being a kid in America.”
His monumental sculptures have been shown in prestigious locations including the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, United Kingdom and the Brooklyn Museum, New York.