“The familiar is just a starting point. Even though the images are widely known, they are somehow personal to me. The emotion in the work is just something that comes out as I develop the works I want to make. I try to make honest work that reflects what I’m thinking at the time I’m producing it.”
The present work by the New York based artist KAWS, playfully confronts the viewer with a dolphin-shaped canvas which combines the artist's most admired iconography with a wide range of pop culture and art historical references. The work seems to leap out of the wall as the cartoonish, sharply outlined dolphin is enigmatically captured at the height of its emergence from the water. The work exemplifies KAWS's continous exploration of new possibilities in art, breaking away from traditional rectangular canvases into three-dimensional abstractions, defying the edge of the canvas and blurring the boundaries between the image and the real world. KAWS freezes the subject, capturing its energy while creating a sense of movement. He is particularly fond of the strong graphic contours, characteristic of cartoon characters, which he distinctively translates into his shaped canvases. This is further highlighted by smooth, bright planes of colour in both geometric and organic shapes.

“KAWS is not just referring to pop culture, he is making it.”
The relationship between American cartoon culture and high art can be traced back to the concept of Pop Art, in which artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein utilized bright colours, industrial uniformity and striking proportions to mimic the eye-catching nature of advertising. Overwhelmed by an endless abundance of images, posters, cartoons and advertisements, KAWS presents the viewer with striking images that have already entered the collective memory - one could imagine them existing in the surrounding space, outside the physical boundaries of the canvas.
KAWS has been exhibited at the Doha Fire Station Museum, National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, High Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Yorkshire Sculpture Park in England, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Yuz Museum in Shanghai. The present Untitled remains a prime example of the artist's striking visual language and bold adoption of styles associated with pop art and abstraction. It is a masterful example of KAWS's significance and his multi-dimensional impact on the zeitgeist of contemporary art.