MAN'S BEST FRIEND
2014
acrylic on paper
This work is a massive gridded rectangle of 50 black and white line drawings. The width of the work is about 3 king size mattresses and it is almost one and a half mattresses high nearly reaching the Gallery ceiling. Each framed drawing is 22 inches tall and 18 inches wide. The grid is composed of two dimensional line drawn characters from Peanuts which resemble Snoopy, a familiar comic strip character which is a Black-spotted white beagle and Snoopy‘s friend, a small bird named Woodstock. In each of the close-ups the character’s eyes are replaced by x’s, in KAWS’s trademark X shape. Recognizable in the paintings are: the spiky feathers on the top of Woodstock’s head, Snoopy’s water bowl, the side of Snoopy’s head and floppy letter U shaped ear, Snoopy‘s short pointy tail and back foot as he walks upright, the top of Snoopy‘s head with a Mountie hat on it, his black dot of a nose, and his up-curving-line wide smile and various extreme close-ups of his eyes marked as an X.
The wall on which this work is hung and two adjacent walls on either side are covered in outsized black lines that look as if they were made with a giant black pen that leapt off of one of the drawings and danced around on the walls with explosive energy. Nearby on either side of the work are sculptures called SHARE and TAKE. On the left is SHARE. SHARE features KAWS’s “Companion” Character standing holding another character dubbed “BFF” which is toy sized and dangles from it’s left hand like a stuffed animal. BFF is bright blue and resembles Sesame Street muppets like Cookie Monster or Elmo. It has bulging eyes atop it’s head with x’s for pupils a round yellow nose and a fuzzy frame like a soft toy. On the right of the grid of drawings, in the opposite corner, the sculpture titled TAKE swaps the two characters; a large BFF stands and clutches a small toy sized COMPANION character to its chest.
Exhibition label text:
In this large black-and-white grid of acrylic works on paper, KAWS references Snoopy, America’s most iconic black-and-white cartoon dog. Creator Charles Schulz debuted Snoopy and friends in 1950 via his daily comic strip, Peanuts . The Peanuts universe expanded beyond the comic to include television specials, syndicated programs, and even books. On his interest in the cartoon, KAWS explains: “I think Peanuts is part of being a kid in America. Whether it’s the Great Pumpkin on Halloween or just seeing a different cartoon in the paper, it’s sort of around everywhere.”
Here, across 50 individually framed compositions, KAWS moves in and out of abstraction to fragment Snoopy’s form and figure, playing with Schulz’s cartoon-black line in a daring but controlled way. The works—along with the vinyl backdrop, which extends the composition out onto the gallery wall—emphasize the centrality of the drawn line in KAWS’s practice.