"Where The End Starts" KAWS at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Last week, The Travelling Toe and 3 Dear Friends went to see the exhibit at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.  The exhibit is art from a gentleman who is know as KAWS.


The piece of work above sits outside the museum and you can see how large it is comparing it to the height of the building.  

The Modern Art Museum Of Fort Worth


We found the exhibit to be interesting and very colorful at times.  We spoke with one of the museum's curators as she was dusting the figures on display.  She inspects the art work daily to see if any dust particles are there and uses a badger brush for the cleaning job. One would think that a badger brush would be stiff but is very soft.  A few of the art pieces have to be dusted everyday. The curator we spoke with said she would be travelling with the museum to it's next destination, which is Shanghai, in order to assist with the set-up.

The museum provided the following overview on their website of the exhibit:

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth hosts a major survey exhibition of the work of Brooklyn-based artist KAWS (American, born 1974) on view in Fort Worth through January 22, 2017, and traveling to the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, China, March through August 2017. Organized by Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth curator Andrea Karnes in close collaboration with the artist, this presentation features key paintings, sculptures, drawings, toys, and street art interventions to examine KAWS’s prolific career in depth, revealing critical aspects of his formal, conceptual, and collaborative developments over the last twenty years.

Spanning the worlds of graffiti, pop art, and consumer culture, KAWS’s bodies of work are highly charged, each conveying his underlying wit, irreverence, and affection for our times, as well as his agility as an artist. He has primarily looked to and appropriated from pop-culture animations (including The Smurfs, The Simpsons, SpongeBob, Hanna-Barbera, and Peanuts) to form his artistic vocabulary for his paintings, drawings, and sculptures. Now well known for his larger-than-life sculptures and hard-edge paintings that emphasize line and color, KAWS’s cast of hybrid cartoon/human characters, with similarities to popular cartoon figures and logos like Mickey Mouse and the Michelin Man, are perhaps the strongest examples of his exploration of humanity. These figures have amicable names—Chum, Companion, Accomplice—and express and provoke an array of human emotions, from sad, overwhelmed, pathetic, and weary, to shy. They reflect feelings and situations we can empathize with in presentations that are balanced with humor, heartening in their cartoon aesthetic.

The museum allowed pictures of the art work so the following pictures were taken by The Traveling Toe and her trusty Apple IPhone.

The sculpture below is quick large and the black part of the sculpture is shiny.

The art work that follows are paintings of Snoopy, Fat Albert and Sponge Bob Square Pants.

                                      

                                                                                                                                          

Here is the Michelin Man and an abstract bunny.  The Michelin Man is black and very shiny, so the curator has to dust him and the bunny everyday.

                 

This one is called "Passing Through"

                                       

A large sculpture. 

The following wood sculptures are made of birch wood and were created in Belgium.

This guy lost his nose and is holding it trying to figure out how to reattach it.

The following wood sculpture is very large. One can get a good perspective of the size comparing it to the people in the picture

We found the exhibit to be bright, colorful and very entertaining.  We saw all this art work for only$4.00 each!!!!  That is one great bargain!!!

KAWS

KAWS