KAWS ART & COMIX

The exhibition examines the porous boundaries between comics, cartoons, and fine art. Placing the American artist KAWS in dialogue with selected contemporary positions, the exhibition foregrounds the artistic autonomy of his characters, which merge elements of pop, commercial, and public art.

Comics function as a widely accessible visual language, long transcending cultural and social boundaries. Even before photography and film, caricature and sequential narration offered powerful means of storytelling. From the 1960s onward, artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, H.C. Westermann, and Keith Haring radically questioned distinctions between high and low art. Contemporary approaches—from KAWS and Joyce Pensato to Cosima von Bonin and Peter Saul—continue this inquiry.

Emerging from graffiti in the 1990s, KAWS first intervened in public advertising by obscuring faces with his signature skull-and-crossbones motif. He later developed his iconic COMPANION and ACCOMPLICE figures into large-scale sculptures in materials ranging from bronze to inflatables. Alternately self-assured, withdrawn, or melancholic, these characters appear alone or in groups, their gestures oscillating between intimacy and isolation.

Throughout the exhibition, comic figures recur as leitmotifs, including in works by Katherine Bernhardt, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, and Isolde Maria Joham. Rather than merely citing popular imagery, these artists probe the physiognomy, gesture, and expressive potential of specific characters.