Artist: KAWS
Title: Tension — Portfolio of 10 Prints
Year: 2019
Medium: 10 screenprints in colours on woven paper, plus cover sheet, in lipped clamshell portfolio box
Dimensions: 89 × 58.5 cm (35 × 23 in) each
Edition: 100 — hand-signed by the artist lower right
Condition: New — original invoice included
Type: Complete limited edition portfolio — 10 prints + cover sheet + clamshell box

Description:

Tension (2019) is one of the most significant and ambitious portfolios in KAWS's graphic catalogue — a complete set of 10 large-format screenprints in colours, packaged in a lipped clamshell portfolio box, representing a sustained and fully developed exploration of the abstract visual language that KAWS has been developing in parallel to his figurative practice. Each of the ten prints presents a dense, interlocking field of coloured forms — sweeping curves, angular planes, dripping gestures, looping lines — in a palette that moves across the full chromatic spectrum: cobalt and teal, crimson and orange, yellow and green, purple and brown, each print a distinct colour world within a consistent formal vocabulary.

The Tension prints reveal KAWS at his most formally adventurous and least immediately recognisable — no Companion, no X-crossed eyes, no figurative reference. Instead, the compositions draw on the tradition of American abstraction — the gestural energy of Abstract Expressionism, the flat colour fields of hard-edge painting, the graphic dynamism of graffiti and street art — and synthesise them into something that is simultaneously art-historically informed and entirely of its moment. The "tension" of the title is felt across each composition: between the controlled and the spontaneous, the flat and the spatial, the decorative and the structural, the organic and the geometric.

Presented in a lipped clamshell portfolio box with a cover sheet — the standard of presentation for the most significant print portfolios of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from Warhol's Marilyn to Hockney's Hollywood Hills — this complete set is hand-signed by the artist on the lower right of each print. Produced in an edition of 100 — exceptionally small for a KAWS publication of this scale and ambition — the Tension portfolio is among the rarest and most sought-after objects in his graphic catalogue. Original invoice included.

Shipping & Delivery:
✔ Worldwide shipping from France
✔ Professional packaging with insurance
✔ Tracking number included for secure delivery