As someone who circulated freely through the urban environment of New York City, Jason Polan’s work as an artist was intimately connected to experiencing all that the metropolis had to offer—and fondly, sometimes obsessively, cataloging its ceaseless variety. Polan moved to New York in 2005 and passed away at the start of 2020. Because his time there spanned the post-9/11 to pre-COVID era, he absorbed the city during the slow reconstruction of lower Manhattan, amid the shock of the Great Recession of 2008, and prior to the dramatic shutdown brought on by the global pandemic.
Both ambition and optimism are inherent in Polan’s embrace of New York's sprawling physical terrain and masses of people, who are without fail rendered as distinct individuals by Polan’s hand. Above all, his artistic project suggests freedom of movement and proximity to others, along with the importance of noticing and carefully documenting, while evoking in retrospect our shared loss of spatial innocence.
“[Jason] died before the pandemic,” Sadie Stein noted in her opinion piece for The New York Times in early 2021, “when most of us still had yet to learn that those occasional breaks from urban anonymity, those small moments of connection—wordless, spoken, odd, quotidian—are a tremendous luxury.”
Apart from regularly sharing a table with friend and artist Stefan Marx at Printed Matter’s annual New York Art Book Fair in recent years, Polan did not exhibit widely or have his work shown by major galleries. Among the exceptions were his first-ever solo show, Living and Working, at Chelsea's Nicholas Robinson Gallery in 2011 and an exhibition featuring some of his works at the Parisian retail boutique Colette in 2013. Nevertheless, Polan’s prolific nature and egalitarian approach made him both a well-known and beloved artist, someone who imbued rare warmth and humanity into his art and everyday interactions, which were ultimately inextricable from each other.
KAWS (Brian Donnelly) b. 1974
American artist and designer Brian Donnelly, better known by the moniker KAWS, is widely known for his distinctive art and cast of collectible figurative toys that have consistently subverted distinctions of high and low culture. Born in New Jersey, Donnelly took KAWS as his graffiti tag in high school, continuing to practice as a graffiti artist when he moved to New York and attended the School of Visual Arts. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in illustration in 1996, subsequently taking work as a freelance animator for Disney. During this time, fellow “Beautiful Loser” artist Barry McGee literally gave Donnelly a key to a new kind of success: a so-called skeleton key that allowed Donnelly to open street advertisement vitrines in order to augment and alter them.
In 1999, Donnelly collaborated with the Japanese brand Bounty Hunter to create a limited edition of small-scale vinyl Companion toys. As he gained recognition and popularity, he continued to rework pop culture icons, effectively “hacking” recognizable cartoons and mascots including Mickey Mouse, SpongeBob, Garfield, Snoopy, and the Michelin Man to make them his own. The demand for these limited editions, which range in size from miniature to life-size to monumental, has at times been overwhelming: in 2017, the MoMA Design Store released a limited edition of KAWS Companion figures and their website was subsequently crashed by the traffic.
KAWS’s career has been defined by his mass appeal and his relatively unique, mercurial position in fine art and commercial markets, leading to comparisons with Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Jeff Koons. As Chris Lee has written for the Los Angeles Times, “By parlaying vandalism into a brand identity as a purveyor of mass-produced collectible toys, KAWS became a bona fide subculture celebrity with a recognizable presence in street fashion.” Among the brands that Donnelly has collaborated with are Vans, Supreme, Dos Equis, Hennessy, Kiehl’s, Nike, Comme des Garçons, and Uniqlo, and his work is held in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, and the High Museum of Art, among others.
Auction Results KAWS (Brian Donnelly)
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