CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/23/2017

Michael Auping on cartoons, abstraction and KAWS

“Looking at KAWS’s paintings is to witness someone who very naturally approaches cartoons and abstraction as symbiotic languages of visual tropes,” former MAM Fort Worth curator Michael Auping writes in KAWS: Where the End Starts. “This is not a simple mixing of the cartoon figure with the abstract, but a blurring of the two, bringing to light the abstract nature of cartoons, as well as the figural possibilities of abstraction. His approach to painting echoes his early working relationship to cartoons, when he sat in front of a monitor for hours studying animation sequences and manipulating them to make figurative as well as abstract sense. Because of this blurring, it’s not always easy to read these paintings." Featured image is Glass Smile (2012).