KAWS Seeing Blue

When KAWS was not much more than the tag of the young sprayer Brian Donnelly from New Jersey, his works were already something special: on his way to work in Manhattan in the 1990s, he regularly sprayed the character "Bendy", which he had invented, on advertising posters that lined his way to work.

The results were subversively ironic reinterpretations of otherwise empty advertising messages. And the works quickly found fans: new graffiti that KAWS had finished in the morning were often gone by lunchtime, sometimes hacked out of the wall, like Banksy.

In 1999, KAWS entered into a collaboration with the Japanese designer label for toys and streetwear Bounty Hunter and launched its first designer toy: Companion.

After that, more than 130 different limited-edition designs followed. But all the figures have one thing in common: as soon as the pieces were released, the demand was so great that very quickly nothing was available. A bit like the graffiti with which KAWS started his career as an artist.