KAWS is opening Day by Day at Skarstedt's new Chelsea gallery, 547 West 25th Street, with a reception on Friday 8 November 2026. The exhibition of new paintings is the first show in the gallery's new downtown space.

The paintings are built up through a stippled technique that mimics the look of spray paint, with colour laid down dot by dot until the image coheres. It is a deliberately slow, manual way of arriving at a surface that reads at first glance as fast and mechanical, and it gives the new works a grain and a shimmer that sits somewhere between the airbrush and the pointillist canvas. Up close the image breaks apart into individual dots of colour, and only at a distance does the figure resolve.

A skeleton COMPANION appears among the works, the familiar figure reduced to bone, while the character CHUM turns up in a mise en abyme, a figure pictured inside a picture of itself. The repetition is characteristic of KAWS: a small cast of characters returned to again and again, each time slightly altered, so that the paintings read as variations on a theme rather than one-off images. The mise en abyme, a picture containing a smaller copy of itself, turns the wall into a hall of mirrors, with the character repeated at shrinking scale.

For Skarstedt, the show marks a second New York address, adding a Chelsea room to the Upper East Side gallery it has run for years. Opening that space with KAWS, one of the most widely recognised names in contemporary painting, is a statement of intent about the kind of programme the new gallery plans to run.