Artist: KAWS
Medium: Color screenprint on Saunders Waterford paper
Dimensions: 88.9 × 58.4 cm
Signature: Signed, dated, and numbered
Edition: 100 copies
Publisher: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Type of work: Limited edition screenprint

Description:

Untitled (from the Tension Portfolio) (2019) is an individual print from KAWS's landmark Tension portfolio — a series of ten large-format abstract screenprints produced in 2019 that represent the most sustained and ambitious departure from figurative work in his graphic catalogue. Published here as a single impression by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne — one of Australia's most significant public art institutions and the host of KAWS's major 2019 survey exhibition — this print bears the institutional authority of a museum publication while retaining all the characteristics of KAWS's most coveted limited editions.

The NGV publication context is significant: the Tension prints were issued in conjunction with KAWS's 2019 Melbourne retrospective, making this impression a documented record of one of the defining institutional moments of his career — the point at which the art world's most prestigious public museum framework embraced a practice that had grown from Brooklyn street art into global cultural phenomenon. The Saunders Waterford paper — a premium British cotton rag with a characteristic cold-pressed surface, associated with the finest traditions of watercolour and fine art printing — gives the screenprinted colours a depth and a textural warmth that the smoother papers of other Tension editions cannot achieve.

The abstract vocabulary of the Tension series — interlocking colour fields, gestural curves, dripping lines, the full chromatic spectrum deployed in dense layered compositions — reveals the formal intelligence beneath KAWS's figurative practice: the same control of colour, edge, and surface that makes his Companion figures so visually commanding operating here without the figurative anchor, in pure painterly space. Signed, dated, and numbered "51/100 KAWS 19" in the lower margin.

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