Amidst the exponentially growing market for collecting Works by KAWS, artist Brian Donnelly (KAWS) manages to find time to build his own art collection. It began in 1999 when Donnelly purchased his first piece by Raymond Pettibon, an ink drawing of a housefly from David Zwirner SoHo before moving to their current Chelsea location. The drawing signed “SWAK” (sealed with a kiss) by Pettibon would then change Brian Donnelly’s life forever. Here he would come up with his signature name KAWS from reversing Pettibon’s note.
From humble street artist beginnings to breaking Sotheby’s auction records, his collection grew as he grew as an internationally recognized artist. The current total of works and the variety of works he has collected is virtually unknown, yet there are a few aspects of it that are public. He shares many of his works indirectly through his Instagram, which has a massive 2.4 million following, allowing him to have more viewer traffic in one day, than most museums and galleries see in a year. Many of these works in his collection make appearances in some of the backgrounds of photos of his daily life taken in his Brooklyn home.
His affinity for the work of Martin Wong is evident in these postings as it is known that Wong collected early work by early New York street artists such as Dondi (Donald White), Lee Quiñones, Rammellzee, and (Chris Ellis). Donnelly resonates with Wong and his collection because of his keen eye for realism and raw street life in New York City. This commonality influenced the majority of the art that they have individually created and collected. Donnelly is also known to have collected numerous works from artists like Carolee Schneemann, H.C. Westermann, and Philip Guston. He has also notably set auction records for twice for David Wojnarowicz and once for Peter Saul. In his living room of his Brooklyn home, a Peter Saul painting hangs Double De Kooning Duck (1979). It features the abstract expressionists classic distorted style in rendition of an earlier figural William De Kooning painting from the ‘Woman’ series. Beside it, sits a more recent addition to his collection, a Roy Lichtenstein piece that is another rendition of a different William De Kooning painting. He completes the trifecta with an actual De Kooning sculpture that he bought at auction. Donnelly has been quoted saying “When you put things next to each other, you start to think about them differently.” The commonality between these works and a few others in his collection is that they are all seemingly renditions and tributes to one another’s works. An additional example of this trend in his collection exists in another work by Saul attributing Marcel Duchamp, and a Tom Sachs rendition of a Brancusi work.
Overall, His collection is centric of art and modes ranging from the 1950s through the 1980s, but is not exclusive of mid-career artists. His impressive collection includes works from his fellow artist friends, Barry McGee and Eric Parker. His collection also includes pieces from Dana Schutz, Sue Williams, Nicole Eisenman, Math Bass, and so on.