KAWS (Brian Donnelly) belongs to a generation of street artists shaped by the comparative anarchy of pre-Giuliani New York, who have benefited from the radical-chic patronage of Jeffrey Deitch. His work has been included in the canon-defining exhibitions Beautiful Losers and Art in the Streets. Having begun as a youthful graffiti tagger in Jersey City, he has since graduated to the more socially constructive and better-paying vocation of gallery artist, showing at the Los Angeles gallery of former model Honor Fraser (along with a couple of other artists recently featured in the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s Focus series). Within the field of street art, KAWS’s work, honed by years spent in Japan, belongs to the more Pop-imagistic stream informed by the mass media, as opposed to the more textual-typographic stream grounded in tagging.

At the Modern, he shows several paintings on the muse of SpongeBob SquarePants, fragments of whose face are tightly enclosed by the boundaries of the canvas. Black Spots (2011), a grid of 21 tondo (circular) paintings, can be read in linear or random order, like the manic sequencing of children’s animation itself. Several other paintings, incongruously, are in black on black, lending a Rothko Chapel-like tragic gloom to the irrepressible animated sponge. Companion (ORIGINALFAKE), from 2011, is an eight-foot Mickey Mouse-like sculpture half cut away, like an anatomical model, to reveal carefully shaped muscles and organs. Of course, one does not expect to find proper anatomy within an imaginary, walking, talking, sexually ambiguous mouse, which makes the sculpture amusing. It is a smaller cousin of the artist’s monumental Companion (Passing Through), 2010, recently on view in New York, Atlanta and Connecticut.