KAWS 'Elmo' Water Parade 2025 Release Details

Artist: KAWS
Title: Elmo (Water Parade 2025)
Medium: Vinyl Figure
Size: 13 cm
Edition: UNSURE
Price: $75

 

*available at 10pm EST on Monday November 3rd, 2025

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Brian Donnelly, known professionally as KAWS, is an American artist and designer born in 1974 in Jersey City, New Jersey. He studied illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York and began his career as a graffiti artist in the early 1990s, tagging walls, billboards, and bus shelters with his now-iconic four-letter moniker. The name “KAWS” has no specific meaning Donnelly chose it simply because he liked the way the letters looked together and how they functioned visually in graffiti compositions.

His early work involved “subvertising,” where he would alter existing advertisements by adding cartoon-like figures, often with his signature crossed-out eyes. This approach quickly gained attention and helped him build a following outside the traditional art world. KAWS later transitioned into fine art, producing paintings, sculptures, and prints that reimagine familiar pop culture characters such as Mickey Mouse, The Simpsons, and SpongeBob SquarePants, infusing them with a sense of melancholy, detachment, and subversion.

KAWS is perhaps best known for his Companion series large-scale sculptures and figures that resemble Mickey Mouse with gloved hands covering the face and Xs for eyes. These works explore themes of isolation, consumerism, and the blurred line between innocence and anxiety. His art bridges the gap between high art and commercial culture, often blurring the boundaries between the two. He has collaborated with major brands like Nike, Dior, Uniqlo, and A Bathing Ape, creating clothing, sneakers, and even cereal boxes that feature his distinctive characters.

Despite initial skepticism from the art establishment, KAWS has become one of the most influential and commercially successful artists of his generation. His work has been exhibited in major museums worldwide, including the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. In 2019, his painting THE KAWS ALBUM sold at auction for $14.8 million, setting a record for the artist and solidifying his place in the contemporary art market.

Today, KAWS continues to live and work in Brooklyn, New York, producing art across multiple mediums from massive outdoor sculptures to intimate drawings always with the goal of reaching as wide an audience as possible. His practice reflects a deep belief in the power of visual communication, whether through a museum wall or the back of a cereal box.

KAWS 'Sesame Street' Vinyl Figures Release Details

Artist: KAWS
Title: Sesame Street (Big Bird Not Included)
Medium: Vinyl Figures
Size: O+E:10 Inches B+E:12.5 Inches
Edition: UNSURE
Price: $1,300/SET

  

*available at 11pm EST on October 15th, 2025

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KAWS is the professional alias of American artist Brian Donnelly, born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1974. He studied illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York and began his creative life as a graffiti writer, tagging the four meaningless letters K-A-W-S on trains and walls because he liked their shape and rhythm

. In the mid 1990s he moved from illegal work to authorised interventions, altering bus-stop and phone-booth advertisements by painting his own characters over the existing models so that fashion campaigns suddenly featured bulbous skull-headed figures with crossed-out eyes. These public takeovers earned him street credibility and led to freelance animation work for Disney on series such as 101 Dalmatians and Daria, experiences that sharpened his sense of line and timing.

During a 1997 trip to Tokyo, Donnelly discovered the Japanese vinyl toy scene and began producing limited edition figures of his character Companion, a Mickey Mouse shaped silhouette whose gloved hands cover a face marked by X eyes. The sculptures sold out instantly and created a global network of collectors who now queue for each new colour way, pushing secondary market prices into the millions. Painting, printmaking and large scale sculpture followed the same graphic clarity: canvases present cartoon icons dissolved into dripping colour fields, while bronzes enlarge the toys to monumental scale, their heads bowed as if weighed down by pop culture itself.

Collaborations with Nike, Uniqlo, Sesame Street, and Dior have carried the KAWS emblem onto sneakers, T shirts and handbags, continuing the artist’s stated aim to communicate with the widest possible audience without hierarchy between museum wall and cereal box. By merging street energy with luxury production, Brian Donnelly has turned a teenage tag into an internationally recognised symbol of contemporary desire.

KAWS 'Clean Slate' Print Available

Artist: KAWS
Title: Clean Slate
Medium: Screen Print on Grey Paper
Size: 24 x 30 Inches
Edition: 100
Price: $8,500

Brad Robson 'Rebel Without A KAWS' Original Available

Artist: Brad Robson
Title: Rebel Without A KAWS
Medium: Oil On Aluminium Panel
Size: 90 x 120 cm
Edition: 1/1
Price: Contact

KAWS 'The Promise' Print Release Details

Artist: KAWS
Title: The Promise
Medium: Multi Color Screen Print
Size: 16 x 20 Inches
Edition: 500
Price: $5,000 (unframed)

Check it out HERE

*available Friday November 25th, 2022 at Noon EST

KAWS 'The Promise' Vinyl Release Details

Artist: KAWS
Title: The Promise (Brown/Grey/Black)
Medium: Vinyl Figures
Size: Unsure
Edition: Unsure
Price: $480 (Guess)

Check it out HERE

*available Tuesday November 22nd, 2022 at Noon EST