WHAT PARTY? KAWS PARTY!

If you, like me, enjoy walking around New York City, you might have noticed them too. Sometime in the fall a set of familiar larger than life characters started appearing in the streets. The Michelin-man-like puffed up black and shiny CHUM caught my attention first. It is perfectly positioned against the stark geometry of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram building. Whoever placed it there is a genius - the building, impressive on its own, provides a spectacular glowing backdrop at night.

Just a few blocks down on Park Avenue, the Pepto-Bismol pink BFF popped up. This one is more playfully located inside a glass and marble lobby. There, it can loom over visitors and “pose” for pictures during the day (judging from instagram feed, it is quite popular) and playfully peek out of its glass and steel “cage” after hours. It’s practically irresistible.

Turns out, there is more to their recent appearance than a simple public art placement effort. These familiar characters gave us a preview, a taste, of the show that has just opened at the Brooklyn Art Museum.

BROOKLYN ART MUSEUM: WHAT PARTY

The latest show, “What Party”, summarizes over a hundred KAWS works, from graffiti drawings and notebooks, paintings and sculptures, to smaller collectibles, furniture, and monumental installations of his popular COMPANION figures. It also features new pieces made uniquely for the exhibition along with his early-career altered advertisements. Read more about the show here.

BRIAN DONNELLY, AKA KAWS

Kaws has come a long way since his beginnings as a street artist in New Jersey and NYC. Always straddling the art and commercial line, his characters with X-ed out eyes and exaggerated skull and bone structure have become iconic. His art comes big and small - from collectible toys barely a few inches high to some of the largest sculptures to stand (or float, as was the case of the Companion in the Hong Kong Harbor) on the Earth. And he continues to evolve. More recently, he’s jumped into the digital space, teaming up with Acute Art, an augmented reality digital art platform that allows you to virtually explore his sculptures and create personalized experiences through an app on your smart phone.

His commercial success is pretty impressive, too. The toys based on his characters continue to sell out and command pretty hefty premiums on the secondary market and serious art buyers are now scooping up his work in droves. KAWS continuously breaks auction house records and in 2019 his works sold for $112 million. Earlier in the year, the Art Angle podcast predicted that i this year’s auctions, KAWS will outsell every old master other than Sandro Botticelli.

If you still want to learn more about KAWS, here and here are a couple of articles you might like.

NEW YORK CITY: THE ART OF SILENCE

New York City. The city that never sleeps. The dream for many. My adopted home. A city that I love. And for the last few months, an epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. A pandemic that forced this bustling, colorful place to come to a screeching halt. Where noise was once omnipresent, only silence rules.

No-one can predict what kind of city will emerge on the other end but one thing is clear already: there is art in the silence. The forced pause emptied the streets, slowed down the pace and gave those who dared to venture out an entirely new, peaceful and captivating side of our city. Words feel superfluous, so come along for a visual walk with me instead. I am glad you can join me.

LINES, TRIANGLES AND SQUARES IN THE CANYONS OF MANHATTAN

When you no longer have to watch for the incoming traffic, moving out of the way of rushing pedestrians and weaving through the crowds to get to your destination quickly, you start paying attention. Noticing the details. Tilting your head upwards to admire the shapes, the lines, the angles that surround you at every step. And they captivate you.

SILENCED ICONS

The big pause has taken away most of the activities that I love and that used to fill up my days. Art galleries, concerts, theater performances are all out of reach for now. So, every now and then, one indulges in revisiting them at least from the outside…

ABOVE ALL, STAY HUMAN AND HOPEFUL

Throughout the early quarantine days, the city’s silence was punctuated by ambulance sirens (a heartbreaking sound) but also by the clapping and cheers for the medical and other essential workers, every night at 7pm. Hearing your invisible neighbors’ cheers and the occasional Frank Sinatra’s or Alicia Keys’ ode to the city that we all share is that other delightful surprise emerging out of the silence… a shared sense of human gratitude and hope. Stay human, my friends and we will come out of this stronger than before.

BUDAPEST CONTEMPORARY ART, PART DEUX

While I try to explore new art destinations, when I recently traveled to Budapest for the second time in under a year, I took it as an opportunity to drill a little deeper into the city’s contemporary art scene.

This time, I moved away from the city center to The Ludwig Museum. The museum holds Hungary’s collection of international contemporary art. Its current location in the nondescript Palace of Arts north of Rákóczi Bridge, focuses on temporary exhibitions in the space that stretches over three floors. A new building by the amazing SANAA architects is under construction and I can’t wait to see it when it’s done. Temporary space notwithstanding, the shows did not disappoint. The Family Album, showing the emotional stories of three families impacted by the Kosovo conflict, pulls at your heartstrings and Dead Web - The End show on the first floor will make you both laugh out loud and ponder what our lives could look like if the web just went away one day. Could we handle it?

My favorite, however, was The Imaginary Cameras show highlighting the work of Tamás Waliczky. Tamás, a media artist who started his work as a cartoonist, is a multitasker. Painter, illustrator, and a photographer who went digital in 1983 focusing on spatial representation of time, futuristic renderings of augmented reality, and the examination of optical distortions. The show, which represented Hungary at the 2019 Venice Biennale, examines mechanisms an designs that inventors could use to create new picture recording devices. The stunning black and white photographs and videos of fantasy machines (cameras, projectors and viewers) captured both the photography lover and the geek in me. I couldn’t get enough and I suspect you would enjoy them as well.

Well done, Budapest!