Auction: Session 11:00 AM Central Time, Thursday, October 30

Our curators picked their favorite items from our upcoming October 30 Urban Art Signature® Auction
| Walter's Picks Walter Ramirez | Senior Consignment Director, Urban Art, New York
Zevs The Straw That Broke The Camel's Back (diptych), 2012
Zevs is a French artist who rose out of Paris's 1990s street-art scene and became known for his "liquidation" paintings, where familiar logos and symbols appear to melt, their power dripping away. Using this signature style, he turns the branding language against itself, exposing how fragile and temporary our shiny emblems of consumer culture are. In his 2012 diptych The Straw That Broke the Camel's Back, Zevs brings that idea into sharper focus. One canvas features the Louis Vuitton logo in Takashi Murakami's playful multicolor style, while the other riffs on Damien Hirst's signature dot paintings. Side by side, they represent two poles of luxury fashion and contemporary art, both polished, loaded with market value, and perhaps on the verge of collapse. The title suggests a breaking point, when too much weight, image, and hype finally make the whole system buckle. With its glossy varnish and slick surfaces, the piece feels seductive yet uneasy, a reminder that everything can still fall apart beneath all that glamour.
KAWS 12 Pieces Bronze Set, 2022-2023
The KAWS 12 Pieces Bronze Set combines a dozen of KAWS's most recognizable figures, reimagined in small but weighty bronze form. Each sculpture, about seven inches tall, captures the artist's signature mix of cartoon nostalgia and contemporary polish, from characters like BFF and Passing Through to other familiar poses seen throughout his career. Cast in an edition of 250, the bronzes have a quiet, collectible energy, balancing playfulness with the seriousness of fine art materials. Together, the set feels like a snapshot of KAWS's evolving world: pop culture turned timeless through craftsmanship. It's both intimate and iconic, a blend of toy-like charm and sculptural presence that perfectly reflects the artist's ability to bridge worlds between street art, design, and high art.
| Taylor's Picks Taylor Curry | Director, Modern & Contemporary Art, New York
Mr. StarCity Let Us Refuse
I've always admired how Mr. StarCity can say so much with so little, and Let Us Refuse really shows that. It has this calm, open energy at first, but the longer you look, the more it draws you in. There's a quiet tension between the soft blue sky and the figure's bold, graphic presence, and even the black balloons echo the head's shape, giving the whole piece a rhythm that feels deliberate but effortless. This is our first time offering a work by Mr. StarCity at auction, which makes it especially exciting to share.
KAWS 4FT Companion (Black), 2007
KAWS' COMPANION has become one of the most recognizable figures in contemporary art, and the 4-foot version really shows why. At this scale, it has a presence that's both commanding and human. The figure's slumped posture and gloved hands covering its face capture that mix of vulnerability and pop-culture cool that defines KAWS' work. What I like about this piece is how approachable it feels playful on the surface, but with an emotional weight that's impossible
| Desiree's Picks Consignment Director, Prints & Multiples, Beverly Hills
Haroshi GUZO (White Marble), 2021
I really love Haroshi's GUZO (White Marble) because marks the Japanese artist's refined shift from his signature recycled skateboard-wood works into the realm of fine marble sculpture. With his hallmark playful figurative character "Guzo," Haroshi retains his pop-culture roots but elevates them into the luxury-material domain, allowing the veined, pristine white stone to lend both elegance and gravitas. The contrast between the artist's dynamic, almost toy-like form and the timeless solidity of marble creates a work that bridges contemporary and classical, collectible and conceptual.
Banksy Donuts (Strawberry), 2009
Banksy's Donuts (Strawberry) is a satirical and vividly iconic screenprint that exemplifies the artist's sharp critique of consumer culture and authority. Created in 2009 in an edition of 299, the work depicts a pink-frosted police van being escorted by motorcycle officers, an absurd juxtaposition that turns a symbol of control into a sugary spectacle. The piece merges humor and tension, embodying Banksy's talent for transforming familiar imagery into biting social commentary. With its bright palette and subversive wit, Donuts (Strawberry) captures the tension between indulgence and power that defines much of Banksy's most celebrated work.
| Hava's Picks Hava Toobian | Associate Specialist & Lead Cataloger, Urban Art
Nigel Howlett Pet Magazine, 2018
Nigel Howlett's Pet Magazine (2018) is a cool, editorial slice of his signature drama: stylized, monochrome, and psychologically charged. At nearly four feet tall in acrylic on canvas, it snaps like a cover line yet keeps its subject just out of reach, a tactic he uses to probe performed identity and the uneasy theater of seeing and being seen. The title winks at print gloss and the pet as possession. The image tests where display meets care and control. Howlett (b. 1979) is a London-based painter known for stark portraits of anonymous, futuristic figures, faces pared to sleek, mask-like forms with emotion routed into charged, theatrical poses. His language is minimal, a little uncanny, and rooted in the surreal. That mood is informed by transhumanism, the idea that humans can use science and technology to push past biological limits, sharpen cognition, re-engineer bodies, extend healthy lifespan, even tinker with identity, which in art often appears as engineered surfaces and figures that sit just beyond the human, cool and polished, blurring person and product. The result here is a crisp, contemporary object with quiet bite, an image that hums at low temperature and holds tension in suspension.
Ryan Travis Christian Untitled, 2011
Ryan Travis Christian's Untitled (2011) is a concentrated hit of his black-and-white world. The small format heightens the pressure of every mark, turning the fuzz and smudge into a nervous thrum. He swings from velvety blacks to gauzy midtones and uses that range to twist the idioms of early cartoons. Two cartoon-eyed critters churn through bedding beneath a cage grid, a suburban tableau that starts as a gag and slowly tilts toward menace. The lineage reads as vintage animation filtered through Chicago-Imagist grit, but the tone is unmistakably his. Christian has built a practice on that tension between deadpan humor and exacting draftsmanship. This drawing condenses that approach into crisp shorthand. You see dense value control, jittery patterning, and a knowingly anachronistic, handmade sensibility.
Find these and other bold Urban and Contemporary Art showcased in ourOctober 30 Urban Art Signature® Auction. This auction's session is 11 AM Central Time, Thursday, October 30th. Sincerely,
|  | Walter Ramirez Senior Consignment Director, Urban Art, New York WalterR@HA.com (212) 486-3521
|  | Taylor Curry Director, Modern & Contemporary Art, New York TaylorC@HA.com (212) 486-3503
|  | Desiree Pakravan Consignment Director, Prints & Multiples, Beverly Hills DesireeP@HA.com (310) 492-8621
|  | Hava Toobian Associate Specialist & Lead Cataloger, Urban Art HavaT@HA.com (214) 409-1491