KAWS has created a new painting and Artist Edition bottle for Absolut, bringing his CHUM character and familiar crossed-out eyes to the Swedish vodka label’s long-running programme of artist collaborations. The project places the Brooklyn-based artist in a lineage that began with Andy Warhol’s Absolut painting in 1985 and subsequently included Keith Haring.
The painting is the starting point. Against a blue background, a yellow CHUM figure holds up a rectangular image of an Absolut bottle, setting one picture inside another. The character’s hands grip the edges while its body sits beneath the framed scene. Clouds, a tilted bottle and white, water-like marks give the inner image its own space, even as CHUM presents it directly to the viewer.
It is a composition that moves between looking at an artwork and looking at an advertisement. Both are present in the same frame, with the bottle becoming an image within the painting before the painting returns to the surface of the bottle.
A painting made to travel
In interview excerpts supplied with the launch materials, originally from CULTED, KAWS explains that he was already exploring pictures within pictures when the commission arrived. He developed the image with its different destinations in mind, from small reproductions to billboards. The composition’s directness comes from that practical consideration: it needs to remain legible at very different scales.
“Most of the projects I do are a document of the time that I’m in,” he tells CULTED. That observation gives the commission a useful context. The work reflects the paintings he is making now, rather than attempting to recreate an earlier chapter of his career for the campaign.
On the bottle, the artwork takes a different form. The front carries CHUM and the artist’s XX motif, while the back reproduces the commissioned painting. The blue-and-yellow palette connects the two surfaces, adapting the image to Absolut’s familiar apothecary-shaped glass silhouette.
From advertising surfaces to artist editions
For readers who have followed KAWS’s work across painting, sculpture and public installations, the movement between these formats is familiar. Brian Donnelly’s early graffiti practice and subsequent interventions in advertising imagery made the circulation of an image part of the work itself. Here, that relationship takes the form of an invited commission, with the artist working directly on a commercial object.
The distinction matters, but so does the continuity. His characters can occupy a painting, a sculpture or a product without losing the graphic features that make them recognisable. CHUM’s rounded silhouette and the XX eyes provide an immediate point of entry; the setting and format change what happens around them.
Absolut’s own art history provides another layer. Warhol’s 1985 painting became the first Absolut Art advertisement, and Haring followed after Warhol recommended him. According to the launch materials, more than 550 artists contributed over 850 artworks between 1985 and 2004. The Absolut Art Collection is housed at Spritmuseum in Stockholm.
The Absolut KAWS Artist Edition launched on 1 October 2026 for a limited period in more than 30 markets, including the UK, Germany, Spain, Mexico, China, Italy, New Zealand, Poland and Korea. The supplied release does not specify a numbered edition size or an end date.
Explore our KAWS artist guide and archive for more of his paintings, sculptures and projects in public space.
Images courtesy of Absolut. Interview excerpts originally published by CULTED and supplied with the press materials.