Built on Symbols

Guy Hepner is pleased to present Built on Symbols, an exhibition of Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Yves Klein, and KAWS. This curated selection of works maps the trajectory of one of art's most enduring conversations: the transformation of images into symbols, and symbols into cultural currency. Across decades and movements, each artist included in the exhibition has contributed to a visual language that is instantly recognisable yet endlessly reinterpreted, collapsing the distance between popular culture and fine art while constructing a shared vocabulary that continues to shape how we see.

Art Positive — Andy Warhol

Art Negative — Andy Warhol

Gun — Andy Warhol

Knives — Andy Warhol

Be A Somebody With A Body — Andy Warhol

Hamburger — Andy Warhol

At the foundation is Andy Warhol, whose Late Paintings series distilled imagery into pure sign. In Art Positive and Art Negative, the word Art becomes both subject and symbol — bold, graphic, stripped of ornament. Gun and Knives confront the vernacular of American danger with the same flat directness. Be A Somebody With A Body and Hamburger translate the commercial image into fine art currency. Warhol's practice demonstrates how repetition and circulation elevate the image beyond representation into something universally legible.

Lenin F.S. II 402 — Andy Warhol

Lenin F.S. II 402 extends this into the political register — a black-on-black silkscreen that transforms the ideological portrait into an ambiguous icon, stripped of propaganda and left as pure image-sign.

Fertility 2 (Littmann PP. 32) — Keith Haring

Fertility 3 (Littmann PP. 32) — Keith Haring

Keith Haring builds on this logic through a language of line and movement. In Fertility 2 and Fertility 3, figures are reduced to their most essential forms — dynamic, almost hieroglyphic signs of creation and life. His work reflects a belief in images as a shared, democratic language: direct, accessible, and built to communicate across all barriers.

L'Ours Pompon — Yves Klein

Yves Klein's L'Ours Pompon introduces a different register of symbolism — the bear as transformed object, cast in Klein's signature International Klein Blue and elevated from decorative motif to emblem of pure colour and presence. Klein's work asks what happens when a symbol is drained of its original context and saturated instead with monochrome intensity.

Urge III (blue) — KAWS

Urge VI (light blue) — KAWS

Urge V (white) — KAWS

Extending this lineage, KAWS reconfigures familiar icons into a distinctly contemporary language. The Urge series — rendered here in blue, light blue, and white — distils emotion into interlocking hands, figures locked in gestures that read simultaneously as comfort, struggle, and connection. Each variant shifts the emotional register through colour alone, demonstrating how symbol and feeling are inseparable in KAWS's practice.

Astroboy, 2020 — KAWS

Together, the works in Built on Symbols form a continuum of image-making, where meaning is constructed through repetition, simplification, and recognition — each piece operating not only as an artwork, but as part of a larger visual vocabulary that continues to shape how we read the world.