lennium that KAWS would emerge from anonymity. Following a fateful 2008 meeting with eminent French gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin (they were introduced by Pharrell Williams), his work started to attract the interest of high-profile brands like Nike, Comme Des Garçons and Uniqlo. A few years later, or more precisely in 2013, he would be ascribed the honour of redesigning the “Moon- man” statue that’s awarded at the MTV Awards, while an invitation would also soon arrive from Dior. It was while he was in Japan that mutual friends introduced him to Kim Jones, creative director of the men's col- lections of this historically important fashion compa- ny, who engaged him on a collaboration. This led to the creation of one of the most recognisable KAWS sculp- tures: the ten-metre tall “BFF” figure, produced from 70,000 pink flowers and featured as the runway cen- trepiece of the Dior show. It was during the same period that KAWS became an important player in the art establishment, with his works being etched into collective perception and the public consciousness, even beyond gallery circles. Known for his slightly arrogant statement “When someone talks about my work in the context of street art, I won- der what he’s looking at”, KAWS would dedicate a good part of his work to the conventional exploration of spa- tial sculpture. And his Companions took on monumen-
tal proportions through the Holiday project - floating on their backs in a Hong Kong harbour, reflecting the blue surface of Seoul’s Seokchon Lake and chilling at the foot of Mount Fiji. And auction prices grew to match his growing influence. “The KAWS Album”, a KAWS-if- ied version of The Beatles’ famous Sgt Pepper’s Lone- ly Hearts Club Band album cover, sold for a dizzying $14.8 million in 2019, outdoing even the most extrav- agant predictions. For someone who has so effortlessly entered the an- nals of the history of the art of this digital age, KAWS is blissfully ignorant of the astronomical sums paid for his works on the market. “You’re not making the work to sell it at auction,” he explains. “That work – if you’re talking about a particular work that went for a record price – was made over ten years before. This is my body of work. And everything I make falls into that history of the work. You have to guide that, because it’s going to be stuck with you, 20 years from now.” Viewing his work in the context of Midtown Man- hattan’s Rockefeller Plaza, where Companion and BFF stand side-by-side with the gilded, shimmering sym- bols of the planet’s capital city, returning him in his glo- ry to the New York streets that represent his creative origins, it seems that KAWS’ signature will feature on art maps for much longer than just these few decades.
Kad neko o mom radu govori u kontekstu ulične umetnosti, pitam se u šta gleda, kaže KAWS When someone talks about my work in the context of street art, I wonder what they’re looking at, says KAWS
Njegovi radovi poprimaju monumentalnu prirodu kroz projekat Holiday His work took on monumental proportions through the Holiday project
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