Artist profile

Karl Kotas

Lowbrow, punk and tiki art, from San Francisco to New York

Karl Kotas’s art tells a story of resilience and never giving up. His path runs through San Francisco’s punk world, Buffalo, Hollywood and New York City: art director at the punk magazine New Wave, gig posters and band art (he became the official artist of The Fems), and the record cover for Mary Monday’s I Gave My Punk Jacket to Ricky.

In New York he showed with the “Lords of Lowbrow” at Ozone Gallery in SoHo, alongside artists like KAWS and Joe Coleman, and later at Fountain Art Fair. For the 2006 World Cup he designed a version of the mascot Goleo, officially licensed by FIFA. The tiki character he first drew for a package-design job became a decades-long fixation, and later a series of NFT drops with the band Lords of Acid.

Along the way: pure abstract acrylic painting and a run of pop portraits, among them Don Draper. The underground-comix line was never the only mode he could work in, just the one he kept coming back to.

Karl Kotas, work installed at 17 Essex Street