Parrish Art Museum Presents KAWS and Julia Chiang Summer Solo Exhibitions

The Parrish Art Museum presents two solo shows this summer featuring internationally renowned artist KAWS and debuting Julia Chiang’s first museum exhibition. The shows open July 14. Both artists have created presentations that include new work aligned with the museum’s architecture in mind.

“We are incredibly excited to feature the two extremely dynamic artists, KAWS and Julia Chiang,” said museum executive director Dr. Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, who curated the exhibition. “An important part of the museum’s work is to expand the field of art, and, to that end, we are delighted that KAWS will present never before seen paintings, together with an unprecedented showing of 11 human-scale sculptures for visitors to enjoy in the museum’s expansive galleries. We are particularly looking forward to Julia Chiang’s first solo museum show, an exhibition that will behold and surprise the visitor both for its lushness and delicacy. Both shows will be a delight for the eye. We anticipate an incredibly vibrant summer season this year.”

“KAWS: Time Off,” which runs July 14 to October 13 is a major solo exhibition devoted to the artist, including a wide array of sculptures and paintings. This exhibition marks the first KAWS survey on the East End.

KAWS is a Brooklyn-based contemporary artist who has achieved widespread recognition for his graphic style and iconic characters. Working in a wide range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, and product design, KAWS’s practice transgresses borders between “high” and “low” culture, questions the conventional hierarchies of the art world establishment, and seeks to democratize the way art is experienced for a new generation.

Fulfilling the promise of predecessors such as Duchamp and Warhol, KAWS has reinvented that legacy for the 21st century and taps into the zeitgeist of contemporary American life. With a deep appreciation for pop culture and a fascination with rampant consumerism, his inventive and graphic sensibility is used to deftly examine the flaws of conspicuous consumption, while also reveling in the joys it sometimes brings. Through his riffs on beloved childhood characters, the work also explores universal emotions of joy, innocence, and love, as well as despair, loneliness, alienation, and a “real life” that doesn’t live up to the promise of youth, or Instagram. Inherent to the work is the question of our role in the current cultural landscape, a moral quandary that asks questions, but provides no easy answers.

Born in 1974, in Jersey City, New Jersey, KAWS received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 1996. He began his career as a graffiti artist on the East Coast where he developed some of the forms that would later become part of his signature iconography. While working as an animator for television and film in the late 1990s, he began to gain underground recognition for his series of advertising interventions, in which he would stealthily remove and paint his characters onto existing commercial ads before returning them to their original locations.

KAWS has exhibited extensively in renowned institutions worldwide, including solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada (2023); Serpentine Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2022); High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia (2022 and 2011); Mori Arts Center Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2021); The Brooklyn Museum, New York (2021); The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2019); Fire Station, Qatar Museums, Doha, Qatar (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, Michigan (2019); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Missouri (2017); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2016) which traveled to the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2017); and many more.

“Julia Chiang: The Glows and the Blows” also runs July 14 to October 13, is the first-ever solo museum exhibition by the artist, who will present new paintings and ceramics. Chiang’s painterly process is slow and controlled while spontaneous. Organic shapes coalesce on the picture plane in varying densities of paint and with fervor, scrimmage for territory. Although she operates in the realm of abstractions, the body is the basis for her allegories, metaphors, and explorations. Her vocabulary is rife with organic forms and formations, which function as introspections that range from the corporeal to the psychological. The organic-looking imagery borrows from the physical — medical scans, internal body liquids and environments — and the psychological — fields of layered feelings and emotions, tensions between internal turmoil and external pressures, between fragility and strength.

“I’m always interested in our bodies as vessels, what we contain and what we cannot,” Chiang said. “All that comes out of us, all that is within us … Borders both real and imagined. Existing in the in-between.”

“Julia Chiang: The Glows and the Blows” is organized by chief curator Corinne Erni with additional support from assistant curator Brianna L. Hernández.

Chiang (American, b. 1978) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and studied studio art and art history at New York University. Chiang has recently been featured in solo-exhibitions at Nanzuka Underground, Tokyo, Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York, The Modern Institute, Glasgow, and The Journal Gallery, New York. This year, she created a mural with RxART for the new SUNY Upstate Nappi Wellness Institute in Syracuse, N.Y. In 2022, Chiang was commissioned by Rockaway Hotel and Spa for the “Rockaway Mural” in Queens, N.Y. She has been an artist-in-residence at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado, The Creative Centre at Mount Sinai Hospital, Henry Street Settlement in New York, HAP Clay Studios in Beijing, and Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont.

The Parrish Art Museum is at 279 Montauk Highway in Water Mill. Visit parrishart.org for details.