the art collectors

Saturday, December 11th, 2010

KAWS x Robert Lazzarini Companion Collaboration

(Product images via kawsone, Lazzarini artwork images © Jeff Newman/TheArtCollectors)

KAWS has just dropped a big one on us all. Next week the artist will release a new version of his Companion figure in collaboration with artist Robert Lazzarini. While KAWS is known for releasing products in several color versions, Lazzarini’s twist on the iconic character goes further, with each of the three renditions distorted in unique ways and manufactured from separste molds. Several t-shirts depicting Lazzarini’s concept illustrations for the project accompany the release.

Lazzarini’s renditions are an extension of his stunning sculptures, which brilliantly warp the perspective on common objects, including the artist’s recent weapons series that was the subject of a 2009 exhibition at the Aldrich Museum as well as recent gallery shows with Honor Fraser and FLAG Art Foundation (see our pics below)  In 2004 his works were shown at The Virginia Museum of Fine Art, whose Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, John B. Ravenal, noted, “Lazzarini’s sculptures are at once rigorously formal and intensely expressive. As distorted versions of familiar objects, they appear in the process of slipping- from three to two dimensions, from realism to abstraction, from this world to the next. Products of a dense and innovative process, his works seem both real and unreal: their striking immediacy is belied by a quality of ghostliness, as if they were hardly there at all.”

Lazzarini also has a recent editioned work produced via the Aldrich Museum available here.