Edgar Plans Turned His Breakout NBA Year Into a Six-Foot Diary Page

In 2022, the Spanish artist folded his first NBA collaboration into Art Notes, the sketchbook-scale format he began building during the pandemic.

A sheet of mixed media paper nearly six feet in each direction sits at the meeting point of two things Edgar Plans has spent his career building: a private view lang and a very public basketball moment. Plans was born in Madrid in 1977 and describes himself as entirely self-taught. He traces his earliest creative memory to the sound of his father’s typewriter (Juan Jose Plans, a journalist, 1943 to 2014) and to drawing on every wall and pavement within reach as a kid in Majadahonda. He now lives and works in Gijón, on Spain’s northern coast.

Plans is best known for a recurring cast he calls “Animal Heroes” or “Little Heroes,” mouse-eared, wide-eyed cartoon figures set against backdrops of scrawl marks and doodles that have drawn comparisons to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Cy Twombly. He names graffiti, street art, comic books, illustration, and animated film as his major reference points, alongside Pablo Picasso. The style sits close to Japanese kawaii, all bright tincture and round aesthetic, but Plans has said the character exist to carry heavier freight underneath. Galleries represent his work tend to describe that freight as gender violence and racism. Plans’s own account of the same characters leans environmental: he’s said the Animal Heroes grew out of an intention to denounce human actions that pollute and damage the planet, with each figure built around simple values, solidarity, companionship, respect, that he sees society losing. The two framie aren’t contradictory so much as two different audience describe the same wide-open premise: a cartoon figure flexible enough to carry whatever cause is closest at hand.

That combo, cute on the surface and point underneath, carried Plans from gallery shows around Spain to six-figure paintings on the international secondary market and an auction high of roughly CN¥4.4 million (around $610,000), set at Christie’s in 2022. He’s represent international by Villazan, the gallery Pablo Villazán opened in New York in 2015 and has since grown into a five-location network span the United States, Europe, and Asia, with a regular show at fairs include Art Central in Hong Kong, Kiaf in Seoul, Untitled Art in Miami Beach, and West Bund Art and Design in Shanghai. Villazan’s own account of his career also lists brand collaborations well beyond basketball, including work with 3.PARADIS and MEDICOM Toy‘s BE@RBRICK line.

Plans has also pushed the same characters into digital and collectible territory well beyond canvas and paper. Working with Candle Media’s Exile Content, he built out a “Lil’ Heroes” and “Lil’ Villains” NFT collection, then follow it in 2023 with a limit run of resin art toys in white, silver, and gold editions, sold directly to that same digital collector base. Sculpture, NFTs, toys, and paper works are, in effect, the same mouse-eared figure doing different jobs in different markets.

 

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“Art Notes” isn’t a single work. It’s a format Plans returns to across galleries and years: oversized mixed-media pieces on paper, built to read like a sketchbook page blown up to wall scale. The earliest confirm instance dates to 2019, when Alzueta Gallery showed “Art Notes III” at 162 by 130 centimeters. During the pandemic, Plans kept an illustrated visual diary that drew enough attention on social media that Villazan later gathered it into a 114-page signed, numbered book limited to 1,000 copies, cover the work he made across 2020 and 2021.

The format kept surface in different rooms after that. Almine Rech exhibited a pair, “Art Notes June I” and “Art Notes June II,” in 2021, each 82 by 102 centimeters. Alzueta later listed “Art notes terror,” dated 2022, at 170 by 135 centimeters. Villazan’s own program has sold indie unique Art Notes pieces with certificates of authentic at scale close to the one at the center of this story: “Art Notes Vampire,” a 2023 work, measures 153 by 183 centimeters.

What ties the series together is less the size than the contents. Cartoon characters mix with handwritten phrases, doodles, and symbols, laid out the way an actual diary might be, which Villazan describes as mapping memory and cultural reference directly onto paper. In 2025, the format reached a wider audience through a print collaboration between Villazan and Phillips‘s retail arm, Dropshop, which released “Art Notes I” and “Art Notes II” as a 30-piece edition of hand-colored screenprints. But the full-scale paper works, made in real time and sold as unique pieces, remain the format’s core. They’re where Plans records something closer to a running log than his canvases or sculptures do.

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In 2022, Plans partnered with the NBA to mark the league’s 75th anniversary, and by his own telling, the project pushed him into large-format sculpture for the first time in his career. He’s described basketball as a childhood obsession, an ’80s kid who dreamed of playing alongside idols Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and Kobe Bryant.

The resulting project, titled “Game On,” sent three-meter-tall versions of his mouse-eared “Little Heroes,” posed mid-play, on tour through Asia. It opened in Shanghai, then moved through Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Singapore, and Seoul. The Hong Kong stop, staged at K11 Art Mall from March 15 to May 7, 2023, rebuilt part of the mall to resemble a working basketball court, with the colossal, fight-or-flight-posed sculptures arranged as if keeping a ball in motion and hoops visitors could actually shoot on; it also marked the global debut of an Edgar Plans x NBA75 badge set and the Edgar x Wilson basketball. Singapore’s leg landed at Funan from late May to mid-July 2023, presented by the agency Art with Love alongside BLAXK by ActionCity and backed by the Singapore Tourism Board and CapitaLand, and debuted a Michael Jordan-inspired sculpture called “Flyman 23,” limited to 400 pieces. Promotional material for the Singapore leg described the Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong stops that preceded it as selling out their limited-edition collectibles quickly, which is part of why the tour kept adding cities rather than closing after a single stop. The sculptures have since traveled beyond Asia too: Exile Content Studio, a Candle Media company, installed a pair of Plans’s Little Heroes sculptures at The Shops at Columbus Circle in New York.

The tour came with a full merchandising program. Misha Made, a Hong Kong edition house, produced resin-and-metal figurine sets limited to 300, plush figures branded for individual clubs including the Chicago Bulls, and an Edgar Plans x Wilson basketball. In Seoul, Plans paired with the Spanish footwear brand Camper for an online charity auction, structured so bidders anywhere in the world could take part, with proceeds going to the Korean Foundation Against Childhood Cancer. He returned to the same subject the following year with “AIR, Tribute to Michael Jordan” (2023), a mixed-media wood panel and canvas piece shown through Tang Contemporary Art, and the sports-and-art crossover has kept going since: in 2025 he made a resin sculpture honoring Kevin Durant for Paris Saint-Germain, and as recently as June 2026 he designed a limited jersey and poster collection for the club with Art Basel, marking PSG’s Champions League win.

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This is where “NBA Art Note 2” fits. Dated 2022, the same year the NBA project began, the piece is mixed media on paper measuring 183.5 by 175 centimeters (72 1/5 by 68 9/10 inches), close to six feet in each direction. That scale sits comfortably inside the range Plans has used for the rest of the Art Notes series, in the same neighborhood as “Art Notes Vampire” at 153 by 183 centimeters or “Art notes terror” at 170 by 135 centimeters.

The title suggests Plans applied his ongoing sketchbook format directly to that year’s basketball collaboration, treating the NBA project the way he’d treated a residency or a season of studio work elsewhere: as material for a diary page, built from the same layered characters, handwritten notes, and doodled marginalia that define the rest of the series. Given the timing, it reads as Plans processing his first year of large-format sculpture and league-wide touring the same way he processes everything else, on paper, by hand.

The numbering also fits a habit Plans has used elsewhere in the series. He’s paired Art Notes works before, as with “Art Notes June I” and “Art Notes June II” for Almine Rech in 2021, using sequential numbering to mark a specific stretch of studio work rather than a strict date. Applied here, “NBA Art Note 2” reads less like a random title and more like Plans slotting a specific project, the NBA year, into a naming system he’d already built for himself.

It’s worth separating this from the newer prints carrying the same name. The 2025 Dropshop drop describes “Art Notes I” and “Art Notes II” as 32-color screenprints on Coventry Rag paper, built from a base print run and then hand-colored by Plans across an edition of 30. “NBA Art Note 2,” by contrast, is catalogued simply as mixed media on paper with no edition size given, which puts it with the series’ unique, fully hand-executed originals rather than its later print editions, closer in kind to “Art Notes Vampire” or “Art notes terror” than to the Dropshop screenprints.

A few things about this specific sheet can’t be confirmed here. The number “2” implies at least a companion work, but no record of a separate “NBA Art Note 1” turned up in the gallery, auction, or press listings available at the time of writing. The installation or studio photography that would show exactly what’s on the paper, which characters, which specific references, wasn’t accessible either, so its imagery is described here only at the level the title and category allow. What is consistent with the rest of the series: Plans’s individually named Art Notes works are typically sold as unique pieces, each with its own certificate of authenticity, rather than as editions.

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Plans’s work moves briskly through the secondary market. Auction results tracked for the artist include “Piet and Mondrian II,” which sold for HK$335,400 against a HK$150,000 to 250,000 estimate; “Love is in the wall,” which brought £90,300 against a £25,000 to 35,000 estimate; “Juanin,” which sold for HK$361,200 against a HK$260,000 to 360,000 estimate; and “Creative Coffee,” which brought HK$406,400 against a HK$300,000 to 400,000 estimate. Nearly all of the tracked results land at or above their high estimate, a pattern that has held across multiple sale seasons rather than a single standout result.

“NBA Art Note 2” has already changed hands at least once. It sold through a Phillips Hong Kong sale for HK$109,650 (roughly $14,000), against a pre-sale estimate of HK$100,000 to 200,000. The specific sale date and lot number couldn’t be independently confirmed from the records available at the time of writing. Phillips has sold multiple Plans works through its Hong Kong day sales in recent years, including “Night Creatures,” which brought HK$571,500 at a June 2024 sale against a HK$450,000 to 800,000 estimate, and the house has separately partnered with Villazan directly on the newer Art Notes print editions through its Dropshop retail arm.

The pattern points the same direction from every angle: a format Plans built out of pandemic-era social media posts has become the connective tissue running through his gallery practice, his sports collaborations, and his own auction record. Four years after the NBA project began, he’s still making basketball-adjacent work for major clubs, and “NBA Art Note 2” remains the point where that first connection and his sketchbook practice landed on the same page.