ALL IN THE FAMILY

The AGO exhibit ‘KAWS: Family’ reveals the breadth of the artist’s influences. And, surprise: his work can make you feel things

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Art Gallery of Ontario’s new show of work by famed and occasionally controversial Brooklyn street artist Brian Donnelly, better known as KAWS.

Most of my encounters with his distinctively cartoonish pop-culture designs have been through his apparel collaborations. Today, you can walk from the AGO across to the Eaton Centre and buy a KAWS T-shirt from the retailer Uniqlo, which is also selling stickers and limited-edition copies of his art book, published by Phaidon (already sold out online). And as much as I love my sneakers, I couldn’t imagine forking out for a pair of 2017 slate grey KAWS Air Jordans going for as much as $7,000 on the secondary market.

Admittedly, I thought of KAWS as a clever merchandising machine and an art world darling for rich and famous collectors. What I didn’t expect was to find — beyond his visual repackaged riffs on touchstones like “The Simpsons” and sugary cereal — were relatable pieces that speak to a modern pathos.

I felt surges of emotion in “KAWS: Family,” as the show is titled, the artist’s first museum exhibition in Canada and the only one to date that examines his work by theme, according to Julian Cox, AGO deputy director and chief curator, who has been working closely with KAWS to bring 75 artworks to Toronto, including sculptures, paintings, drawings and, yes, product collaborations.

Perhaps it was the mood or the fact that I’ve been over-binging a medical TV drama, but one of the first pieces encountered in the space, “Gone,” struck me for its ambiguous sadness. Here, one of the earliest and most iconic characters in KAWS’s crew, “Companion” — a matte grey Disney-inspired creature with Mickey Mouse shorts, a skull head and long, petal-like ears — carries a limp, glossy bubble-gum Elmo-like figure in his arms.

It’s a classic rescue pose, but because KAWS’ characters have slashed Xs for eyes and no mouths, we’re left to interpret through the artwork’s title.

What is their relationship? Is the pink guy dead? Injured? Hopefully he just fell asleep on the couch and is being carried off to bed.

“The beauty for me is that it can flex in multiple directions,” said Cox. While KAWS began his career as an industrious Jersey City street artist before attending art school and working as an animator at the Walt Disney Company, his slashed eyes are actually a nod to underground comic artists such as Robert Crumb and Victor Moscoso, who employed this kind of hatching in their drawings. The show includes some of KAWS’ own early drawings where you can see the lineage in his interpretations of characters such as Count Chocula and Frankenberry.

“The X is simple and quick, but also symbolic in that it’s struck out or prohibited or concealed in some way,” said Cox. “I think people take their own interpretations from it.”

Although KAWS spoke onstage with Cox about his career before the media preview, he disappeared quickly — notorious for not speaking in depth about the meanings behind his work. This elusiveness has frustrated some critics in the past, eager for more discussion about his relationship to mass-produced works and consumer-driven collaborations with companies such as Nike and General Mills.

“He doesn’t love to get drawn into those conversations,” said Cox. “Not because he wants to be the man of mystery, but I think he likes that ambiguity and how things can be taken in different ways: from an individual artwork to all the different activities he’s involved in. He’s very chameleonic and has this ability to engage and embrace different situations and imagery and play with it.”

Onstage, KAWS did speak about the other influences in his career, in particular, a life-altering trip to Japan where he first met other likeminded artists. He mentioned how he studies works by artists as unlikely as Norman Rockwell, and is clearly a passionate art collector himself.

“He’s is a very generative thinker, and loves to absorb a multitude of different elements and then sort of synthesize them down into an essence,” said Cox.

Some of the strongest works in the show are KAWS’ colourful hardedge paintings, which appear to take three-dimensional scenes and flatten them into abstract shapes that maintain their signature appeal. I was reminded of special episodes of “The Simpsons” when its motley crew of characters would be rendered in other animation styles like Claymation. Still recognizable but in an unfamiliar space and format, you look at how they take up space in a different way.

Beside a couch created with “Sesame Street” plush toys, a series of paintings returned me to a sense of melancholy. “Adrift in the Abyss,” from 2022, sees KAWS’ characters literally adrift, trapped in a box surrounded by water. According to Cox, these paintings are about adapting to life during the pandemic. “Again, he’s humanizing what that experience feels like and having his characters be the vehicle for that now.”

Another surprise for me was the show’s overall sense of materiality. Sculptures like “Gone” are especially striking when you realize they are created from bronze painted to look like plastic: a heavy material that looks light enough that you could pick up this massive work and toss it in the air. Onstage, KAWS spoke about how anything created from plastic is considered a product, but the same object in bronze is considered art. Painting bronze to look like plastic in a museum context feels coy and subversive.

“KAWS: Family” moves out of the main room into a secondary space in the Galleria Italia, where you are greeted by a rich wood Companion sculpture that looks completely grounded and at home in the airy, windowed space. Download a QR code and you can also experience KAWS’ virtual work on two platforms, invisible to the naked eye without an app.

The third and final space of the show is tucked away beside the expansive Henry Moore sculpture room with its gloriously earthy reclining figures. Cox said that, when the artist visited, he was immediately drawn to this third space,

which is also dedicated to sculpture.

“He really liked the idea of being adjacent to Henry Moore,” said Cox. “We wanted to think about the space first of all and have him react to that, but also make it about how he magically brings all these materials together in his work.” (While you’re there, don’t miss the excellent show next door, “Re-Mixing African Photography: Kelani Abass, Mallory Lowe Mpoka and Abraham Oghobase,” which reinterprets Western photographic traditions.)

This tight room with its explosion of colours and textures creates an interesting juxtaposition to the minimalist weightiness of Moore’s sculptures. Here, newer pieces like a land-bound space-age character created in a shiny stainless steel are surrounded by some of KAWS’ early works as a street artist in the late 1990s when he would tag Manhattan billboards and phone-booth ads for brands like DKNY and Captain Morgan.

One of those standout pieces is a 1997 photographic ode to artist and activist Keith Haring, who also shared his early art on advertisements in the New York subway. Created by KAWS seven years after Haring’s death, this marked the same year as the first major retrospective of the late artist’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a show that would then travel to the AGO. And here we are, 26 years later, and the AGO is preparing for a new Haring show, opening Nov. 8.

Cox hopes that visitors to “KAWS: Family” will see all these works side by side and take away a sense of the artist’s breadth.

“And I hope they’ll tune in a little bit into its emotional tenor,” he said. “All great exhibitions, in my view, should be instructive and eyeopening, but also provide opportunity for reflection, and I think KAWS’ work does that through these distinct personalities and characters.”