If you sometimes find contemporary art too strange or confusing, The Andy Warhol Museum has the show for you. “KAWS + Warhol” is as accessible as a child’s toy chest, or the brightly colored cereal box on the family breakfast table — if also, at times, a bit grim.
The big exhibit, which opened Saturday to mark the museum’s 30th anniversary, pairs iconic Warhol works with paintings and sculptures by Brooklyn-based Brian Donnelly, who emerged from New York’s 1990s street-art scene. Working as KAWS, he’s known for cartoonish characters with x’d-out eyes striking dejected or ironic poses. His Mickey Mouse take-off, "COMPANION," has itself become an icon, with sculptures exhibited in London, China and Switzerland — and monetized in toys, sneakers, T-shirts and more.
On the surface, the show makes a lot of sense: KAWS is often compared to artists like Jeff Koons and Warhol, who made his name with renderings of Campbell’s Soup cans and Brillo boxes.
The seed for the exhibit was planted several years ago when Warhol director Patrick Moore visited a KAWS show at New York’s Skarstedt Gallery.
“I went into the gallery and it was just filled with kids, who were sitting on the floor, taking pictures with the work, completely at ease and completely engaged,” Moore said. “And I thought, ‘We absolutely have to have this in Pittsburgh. We have to have an artist come and work with us who has the ability to interact with young people in that way.’”
Both KAWS and Warhol have a reputation for bright colors and knowingly superficial image-making. But Moore successfully pitched Donnelly, who is 49, on doing a joint show that explored what Moore called the little-noted darker sides of their work.
“If you really look at them, there’s this undercurrent that makes them, at least for me, much more interesting, which is a fascination with death, with tragedy, with sadness, compassion, nostalgia,” said Moore, who curated “KAWS + Warhol.”
The show is accompanied by “Together,” a large-scale KAWS sculpture in teak of two COMPANION figures embracing that is temporarily installed in the museum’s Pop Park, right across East General Robinson Street.
The exhibit proper takes up the museum’s entire second-floor gallery space and part of the fourth floor. The first sight most visitors will see is COMPANION lying face down on the floor in front of the wall-mounted “Ambulance Disaster,” a large-scale selection from Warhol’s “Death and Disaster” series that repurposes a gruesome black-and-white tabloid photo of a car accident. Those approaching the works will pass between two of Warhol’s large-scale, wall-mounted skull series.
And if COMPANION’s modest matte finish makes him look like cheap plastic, be apprised he’s actually cast in bronze — a bit of downscaling KAWS legerdemain that appears repeatedly throughout this exhibit.
Nearby, a KAWS painting of COMPANION behind prison bars is puckishly hung alongside selections from Warhol’s spooky series of prints of electric chairs.
Another gallery mines nostalgia, with Warhol’s prints of Mickey Mouse and Howdy Doody facing off against KAWS’ COMPANION and Elmo paintings.
A section titled “Anxiety and Dread” features a KAWS painting of a distressed-looking SpongeBob SquarePants adjacent to a looping projection of a black-and-white Warhol film showing the head and shoulders of a man during a sex act. Another large COMPANION, hands pressed to his face, sits with his back to the screen.
Another second-floor gallery hearkens to KAWS’ roots in street art with an array of one-sheet posters for DKNY clothing and Guess Jeans that he defaced — or augmented, depending on your perspective. And Moore includes KAWS’ 2007 augmentations of two Warhol posters for Chanel No. 5, which were never shown on the street. (Warhol died in 1987.)
In the same space stands a sculpture of COMPANION holding the limp body of Sesame Street’s Grover, his eyes also x’s. And nearby hangs one of Warhol’s “fright wig” self-portraits paired with KAWS’ sculpture of his own head, disembodied and ball-capped, lying on the floor.
The fourth-floor galleries, more lighthearted, feature the exhibit’s lone newly commissioned KAWS pieces. One space is devoted to KAWS’ 2022 project for General Mills, to create new versions of the boxes for Count Chocula, Boo-Berry, Frute Brute and Frankenberry.
In partial homage to Warhol’s penchant for making wallpaper (think “cows”), three gallery walls consist of a grid of some 2,000 of those cereal boxes encased in Plexiglas. One wall features KAWS’ new 6-foot-tall paintings based on the boxes. And to either side are 4-foot-tall sculptures — again, bronze finished to resemble plastic — of the eponymous characters that buyers of some of the cereal boxes could enter a drawing to win.
Nearby sits an array of Warhol’s Brillo boxes and other product cartons. Moore notes that these iconic objects were never actual cardboard cartons, but plywood boxes Warhol silkscreened to look like the real thing, complete with logos.
“Warhol gleefully erased the line between the fine-art world and the commercial world, and I think Brian has done that and carried on that tradition in the most delightful way,” Moore said. Referring to the Brillo and cereal boxes, Moore added, “We wanted to look at an object that appears to be an industrial object but is an art object, and an object like the cereal boxes that were commercial but were taken into the realm of fine art.”
The thread of commerce runs strongly through the exhibit, and not just because KAWS’ Chum character echoes the Michelin Man in the same way COMPANION summons Mickey Mouse. “KAWS + Warhol” was funded by Uniqlo, the global clothing retailer that has been licensing Warhol’s art for T-shirts and such since 2004, and has been collaborating with KAWS since 2016.
Critics have implicated KAWS in the way contemporary art has become, increasingly, an expression of the desires of investing class. (At the Warhol, one of the two towering Chum statues is on loan from music producer Pharrell Williams, one of KAWS’ many celebrity collectors.) And even some those who admire his early street art have been disappointed by his gallery work.
Nonetheless, KAWS works are in the collections at museums including the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. And their commercial appeal is indisputably huge. In 2019, his painting “The KAWS Album” sold at auction for the equivalent of $14.7 million. The work is a spoof of a parody — a take-off of the cover of “The Yellow Album,” which was a musical spin-off from TV’s "The Simpsons" that parodied the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” “The KAWS Album” — commissioned by Japanese fashion designer NIGO — featured Simpsons characters with his trademark x’d-out eyes and bone-shaped protrusions from their skulls. The characters were themselves recycled from KAWS’s “Kimpsons” series, his takeoff on “The Simpsons.”
In a statement, KAWS said he is honored to be shown at the Warhol.
“Warhol’s bold and unapologetic approach to art continues to inspire generations, and his ability to challenge conventional norms through his work is a testament to his visionary genius,” said KAWS. “As an artist, I am humbled to be part of an exhibition alongside Warhol at his eponymous museum and to contribute to the ever-evolving legacy of one of the greatest artistic minds of our time.”
“KAWS + Warhol” runs through Jan. 20. In 2026, it is set to tour to Tokyo and Kyoto. It will also possibly travel to Europe, said Moore.
He said the exhibit is in the spirit of Warhol’s own 1980s collaborations with then-emerging artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Julian Schnabel.
The show in fact serves as Moore’s swan song with the museum where he’s served as director or acting director since 2016.
“I think it’s the way to go out” worked on it a couple years,” he said. “I think it enhances the reputation and standing of both artists.”
