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Lot Essay
Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner the same year it was made, UNTITLED (GUESS) is an example of KAWS’ iconic ‘ad disruptions.’ Across the 1990s and early 2000s KAWS—real name Brian Donnelly—removed commercial advertising posters from bus-stops and billboards around cities such as San Francisco and New York City, to which he added his own singular graphic imagery. In the present work, atop an advertisement for the clothing brand GUESS, a riotous swirl of coral pink paint encircles a model whose face has been transformed into one of the artist’s instantly recognisable ‘companions,’ complete with crossed-out eyes. A defining figure within the street art movement of the late twentieth century, KAWS inherited from Pop artists such as Andy Warhol, and later Jeff Koons, an irreverent embrace of consumer culture within the realm of ‘high’ art. With a practice spanning drawing, painting, sculpture and product collaboration, since 2011 KAWS has been the subject of museum surveys across the globe, including recent presentations at the Parrish Art Museum, Watermill (2024), and a retrospective which travelled from the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville (2023-2024).
KAWS conceived of the ad disruptions through a lens of collaboration and communication rooted in their contemporary moment, and he admired many of the photographers whose commercial work formed their basis. Often he would return the posters to their original location, so that behind the glass panels which encased them KAWS’ street-art aesthetic was indistinguishable from the slick, glossy veneer of the fashion advertising industry. Later he would actively collaborate with fashion photographers such as David Sims, with whom he worked on several magazine projects. ‘When I started painting on advertisements, it occurred to me that the ad really set the work in a specific time,’ KAWS explains. ‘I think that’s when I realised it was more about communication. There was a dialogue to it’ (KAWS quoted in T. Maguire, ‘KAWS,’ Interview Magazine, 27 April 2010). At the same time, in many cases advertising billboards had been erected to cover walls once the domain of street artists, and as such there is an irrefutable element of reclamation embedded in KAWS’ intervention-based project.
KAWS conceived of the ad disruptions through a lens of collaboration and communication rooted in their contemporary moment, and he admired many of the photographers whose commercial work formed their basis. Often he would return the posters to their original location, so that behind the glass panels which encased them KAWS’ street-art aesthetic was indistinguishable from the slick, glossy veneer of the fashion advertising industry. Later he would actively collaborate with fashion photographers such as David Sims, with whom he worked on several magazine projects. ‘When I started painting on advertisements, it occurred to me that the ad really set the work in a specific time,’ KAWS explains. ‘I think that’s when I realised it was more about communication. There was a dialogue to it’ (KAWS quoted in T. Maguire, ‘KAWS,’ Interview Magazine, 27 April 2010). At the same time, in many cases advertising billboards had been erected to cover walls once the domain of street artists, and as such there is an irrefutable element of reclamation embedded in KAWS’ intervention-based project.