The High Museum of Art will premiere a major multi-site exhibition of work by KAWS opening to the public on February 18, 2012. The exhibition features a 22-foot-high, site-specific mural painted in the Margaretta Taylor Lobby of the High’s Wieland Pavilion and a 24-foot-long triptych hung in the Museum’s Robinson Atrium. In addition, the exhibition will include three new major works including a grid of 27 round paintings, a group of KAWS toys, drawings, and a collaborative project with British Photographer David Sims.
The exhibition will also include KAWS’s monumental sculpture Companion (2010), which was installed on November 18, 2011 on the Museum’s piazza, in advance of the main exhibition opening in February.
KAWS: DOWN TIME has been organized exclusively for the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, by the High’s Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Michael Rooks. The exhibition will coincide with a public program featuring KAWS and Michael Rooks in conversation at the Alliance Theatre. The program starts at 7 p.m. on Thursday, February 16, as part of the High’s Conversations with Contemporary Artists lecture series.
Highlight
An influential member of a new generation of street artists who have successfully united commercial enterprises with their artistic practices, KAWS employs his skill and delight as a designer of toys and other objects in his practice as a painter and sculptor. The objects he produces for commercial consumption are in direct dialogue with his art; in fact, he thinks of his t-shirt designs as “drawings.” His new paintings in this exhibition allude to pop culture sources such as Sponge Bob Square Pants, as well as the more obscure work of artist H. C. Westermann, who also drew upon popular cartoon imagery in his work.