KAWS has marked a strong end to the 2024 calander with the announcement of two new shows. KAWS DAY BY DAY opens on November 8th at Skarstedt Chelsea. The exhibition will present a series of new paintings highlighting recent developments in his working method and iconography, recontextualising elements from art history and his own oeuvre, thereby inviting viewers to engage with a dynamic interplay of references.

To contrast these new works, the artist has also shown his versatility, with the artist turning curator with The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection. Featuring more than 350 artworks chosen from his vast personal collection of over 3,000 works on paper by some 500 artists, The Way I See It showcases a diverse range of artists and interprets the term “drawing” broadly to include comics, commercial illustrations, and graffiti sketches. The exhibition challenges long-held hierarchies and radically expands our understanding of what constitutes a great work of art. It includes works by Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning, self-taught masters such as Martín Ramírez, Henry Darger, and Adolf Wölfli, and comic artists like R. Crumb. The Way I See It also highlights KAWS’s impressive holdings of works by artists Peter Saul, H.C. Westermann, Helen Rae, and Susan Te Kahurangi King, alongside archives of works underrepresented in the artistic canon, including those of renowned American graffiti writers such as DONDI, SERVE, and FUTURA 2000.

For KAWS, this collection functions as a personal reference library — a way to study the progression of an artist’s style, to think abstractly about the marks of a drawing, and to remind himself that there’s more than one way of making art.