No KAWS for concern: the Brookyln “contemporary pop artist” takes on Yorkshire

KAWS is very unlike other artists. He’s an extremely sweet chap, offering to help with bags, eagerly leafing through a catalogue to help him make a point, trying his best to make sure that everyone is ok as we visit him at his new solo show in Yorkshire Sculpture Park, trundling between sites in his hen do-esque pink KAWS minibus. Alongside this sweetness and earnestness, his approach to art and the art world feels very unusual: rather than getting lost in a slew of post-rationalisaton or relying on PR words to speak for his work, he’s keen to dispel ideas about concepts of the work other than those you form from what you see in front of you. Whatever you think of his work, it’s a very honest approach: these are characters, they’re heavily graphics-based, they unashamedly cast their little cross eyes on the march market as much as they glare across the gallery floor.

“I remember starting out it was always put to me that you can either be like a fine artist or a commercial artist, but you have to choose your path – if you want any luck having shows in a gallery or museum you can’t really be messing with making this product or those sort of things,” he says. “And when you’re younger that seems very serious. I thought it was ridiculous: I thought if I like things – if I’m approaching them and thinking about them and taking what I’ve learned and putting it into them – that’s something I should be doing.”

It’s easy to look at KAWS’ work, all cutesy sinister figures and bright brushwork, and see that they’re eminently sellable, whether in commissions for clothing lines, little collectible figurines or a large shiny lobby. And that’s not necessarily something he’s afraid of.

“I guess the commercial products I made have all been very personal to me, so it’s not like being hired to design a particular thing,” he says. “I don’t think there are any other artists with my same trajectory or interests, I’m very interested in making products and in design as well as making paintings and sculptures. I look at the artists I admire, like H. C. Westermann, or the Chicago artists, or Jeff Koons, and you extract from them until you find what interests you.”

KAWS (real name Brian Donnelly) began his career daubing the streets of New York, and since shot to fame through his numerous appropriations of pop culture icons like Mickey Mouse, The Simpsons characters and SpongeBob SquarePants. Throughout his work, he’s shown a canny eye for what gets people’s attention: in his case, character design that merges childhood nostalgia with the macabre, and that’s rife for joining up the dots between street art, fine art and merch.

He adopted KAWS as his graffiti tag for its adaptability across subway trains and the like. He moved on to overlaying billboards and ad posters with a series of distinctive icons. It’s testament to how far street art has travelled from the streets to the galleries’ white walls to huge art institution displays that Brooklyn-based artist KAWS is staging a suitably super-sized show at Yorkshire sculpture park. His YSP show marks his first UK museum exhibition, and alongside the enormous sculptural pieces of downtrodden clown-like figures, the Longside Gallery hosts his huge, pop-art-indebted canvases. These are created meticulously by hand, through painstakingly building up layers of acrylic paint first applied by himself and later with the help of one of his six gallery assistants, who work with him in his studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (“Hey, I’ve lived there for 14 years!” he protests when I smile at the mention of New York’s Shoreditch).

The show features a number of new painted works, which build on his previous brightly coloured, heavily black lined works that provide abstracted close-ups of cartoon frames. They are created first through creating sketches of shapes in Illustrator and using a digital moodboard of found imagery, before being created freehand on the canvas. The forms emerge in the making. “When I’m making a painting I don’t have a goal, I’m just fighting my way round it,” says KAWS. “Oftentimes when I’ve finished a painting and step back from it it leads me on to making new bodies of work.”

Whether working in sculptures to the gargantuan scale of those proudly stood in the Yorkshire countryside, the smaller figures in the gallery, the products that Japan went nuts over or the canvases on the walls around us, KAWS’ MO is very Warholian in its re-appropriation of advert into art, and his propensity for replacing eyes with a cross soon became his signature mark. It’s something he’s not really strayed from in decades, which could be viewed as a fidelity to his message or a tendency to play it safe. “Images work like that – once they’re out in the world the world has that as a reference point, and people can choose to take it or leave it,” he says. “I’m not trying to impose a way to feel about a work, I’m just sort of making the work and putting it into the world, take from it what you want.”

So what does he see as the function of his, or indeed anyone else’s art? “I think art brings people together – when I look at that sort of endless exploration in the stuff I make and investigate, I get into other artists and learn about them and their work. You think about what was happening at the time, you think about their peers and their work and you sort of like follow down the rabbit hole, I don’t know, it’s sort of like an endless movie.” Later in the day I see a group of chattering Yorkshire nans and their doted on terriers admiring KAWS’ work out in the open air. One tells me she came out with her ageing King Charles Spaniel especially to see the new sculptures. There’s something charming in the democratic nature of the pieces, especially in this context. So it seems his utopian ideas have come true: people are coming, people are being brought together, and everyone – from the gallerists to the nans to his two-year-old daughter – are making up their own minds about it.

KAWS is at Yorkshire Sculpture Park from 6 February – 12 June 2016