Posted on
2014-09-08
In a new body of work, what appear to be non-representational images are variations on small details of Charles M. Schulz’s iconic drawings of characters from his Peanuts series. Original Peanuts comic strips appeared in American and international newspapers every day from 1950 until Schulz’s death in 2000, establishing the characters as significant figures in the American pop cultural vernacular for generations of young people. In this series, KAWS has enlarged tiny instances from the familiar renderings of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Pig-Pen, et al. Remaining faithful to Schulz’s original line drawings, KAWS has executed a grid of fifty works on paper in black and white. A sculpture made of the commercial synthetic building material known as Corian complements the drawings. The transparent Corian reveals a manipulated Schulz sketch like an extruded line drawing suspended in space. Though the Peanuts characters are blown so far out of proportion that they are nearly unrecognizable, KAWS leaves just enough information for us to identify his subjects, underscoring the ubiquity of these figures and the power of the repetition of images to enter our cultural memory.
Underlying all of KAWS’s work is a deep ambivalence around culturally held notions of entertainment and fun and its relationship to advanced art. Through his stylized adaptations of icons of American animation, he accesses a collective consciousness to mirror our ongoing addiction to the culture industry, an addiction that is fueled just as much by our own knowing acceptance of its machinations as by its own intentions.
Opposite – Untitled, 2014
Exhibition runs from September 13th to October 31st, 2014
Honor Fraser Gallery
2622 S La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles
CA 90034
www.honorfraser.com
