Forty Years After Warhol, KAWS Puts His X on the Absolut Bottle

Absolut’s art program began with an Andy Warhol painting in 1985. Its newest chapter prints KAWS’s CHUM and his signature XX straight onto the glass.

On Absolut’s newest bottle, two letters do most of the talking. Across the front of the Swedish vodka’s apothecary sil sits the doubled X that KAWS has been pressing onto cartoon eyes, vinyl toys and bronze sculptures since the 1990s, alongside CHUM, the puffed-up, ring-bodied character he has been drawing for more than twenty years. Turn the bottle around and the back carries a reproduction of a painting Absolut commissioned from the Brooklyn artist for the project, the work the entire design was built from. It is called the ABSOLUT KAWS Artist Edition, it went on pre-order on October 1, 2026, and it extends an art program the brand has been running in one form or another for more than four decades.

Signal. What happened: Absolut Vodka rel a limited Artist Edition bottle designed by KAWS and built from a painting the brand commissioned from him. Exact object: the ABSOLUT KAWS Artist Edition, Absolut vodka at 40% ABV, with KAWS’s XX motif and CHUM character on the front and an image of the commissioned painting on the back; no retail price or production run was disclosed at launch. When and where: pre-orders opened October 1, 2026 at Absolut.com ahead of a limited rollout to select US retailers, and the edition is available from the same date in more than 30 markets including the UK, Germany, Spain, Mexico, China, Italy, New Zealand, Poland and Korea. Source: Pernod Ricard USA’s October 1 announcement and Absolut’s international release. Why it matters: after two years of reviving 1980s artwork by Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, Absolut has handed its bottle to a living artist making new work, one whose own history with the brand runs back to its earliest art ads.

 

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The launch campaign jure the idea at architectural scale. Its key view crops a towering yellow figure at the shins, two rounded, ribbed legs planted on a concrete rooftop, each with an X pressed into the ankle, while a dense skyline fills the gap between them. Below sits a lockup that reads ABSOLUT XX, over a smaller line billing a KAWS Artist Edition for a limited time only. It is a tidy bit of graphic design: the multiplication sign that usually sits between two collide names has been swapped for the artist’s own mark, twice over, and the campaign hashtag, #AbsolutXX, carries the same joke onto social feeds.

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Absolut’s practice of handing its bottle to artists dates to 1985, when Andy Warhol painted Absolut Warhol, the canvas that became the brand’s first art advertisement. Warhol then steered the company toward his friend Keith Haring, whose version became a fixture of the 1986 campaign, and the relay kept going from there. Between 1985 and 2004, more than 550 artists made over 850 works around the bottle’s outline, from Ed Ruscha’s howling wolf to Louise Bourgeois’s spider, in media that ranged across painting, photography, furniture, fashion and handicraft. Whatever form a piece took, it had to portray the bottle. Absolut now frames the archive as a time capsule, assembled against a backdrop that ran from the Studio 54 years and the first shock of the AIDS epidemic to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the arrival of the information age.

When the Swedish state sold Absolut to Pernod Ricard in 2008, that art collection was treated as part of the country’s cultural heritage and kept out of the deal. The government later donated it to Spritmuseum, the museum of Swedish drinking culture that opened in 2012 in the Galärskjulen buildings on Djurgården in Stockholm, and the collection has been shown there ever since. Its current exhibition, Absolut Absolut, a survey of the brand’s advertising story, opened in May 2026 and runs into March 2028.

The bottle has a design story of its own. The name traces to Lars Olsson Smith, the 19th century spirits merchant who launched Absolut Rent Brännvin, roughly “absolutely pure vodka,” in 1879, and every bottle still carries a medallion bearing his portrait. A century later, Sweden’s state-owned spirits company relaunched the brand for export in a clear bottle modeled on an old Swedish apothecary bottle, with its lettering printed straight onto the glass instead of on a paper label. The first American order, 700 cases bound for Boston, went out in April 1979, and the two-word print ads that began with Absolut Perfection in 1981 turned the silhouette into one of advertising’s most durable props. The vodka is still made in and around Åhus in southern Sweden from local winter wheat and well water, and its owners now sell it in more than 160 markets, moving close to 12 million nine-liter cases a year.

Lately, Absolut has been mining that archive directly. Its 2024 limited edition, Absolut Warhol, was built on a second Warhol painting of the bottle, a blue canvas from 1985 that went overlooked for 35 years until it resurfaced at auction in 2020, confirming that his original contract had covered two paintings; Spritmuseum then made it the centerpiece of a Warhol exhibition that autumn. The bottle was screen-printed in five colors of glass enamel at Ardagh Glass Packaging’splant in Limmared, Sweden, with the artwork adapted to come alive once the vodka was inside. The 2025 follow-up, the Absolut Haring Artist-Edition, revived Haring’s red dancing figures on a yellow ground, debuting in travel retail that July before rolling out to more than 40 markets from October. Both were tributes to artists who died decades ago. The KAWS edition breaks the pattern: the painting on its back did not exist until Absolut asked for it.

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Brian Donnelly was born in Jersey City in 1974 and settled on the KAWS tag as a teenager, picking the letters because he liked how their shapes sat together. He grew up skating, and many of the kids he skated with wrote graffiti, so he ended up painting trains and billboards long before he earned an illustration degree in Manhattan. His first job out of school was freelance background painting for the animated series 101 Dalmatians, Daria and Doug, work he assumed would pay for his real practice rather than become a career.

Through the 1990s, that real practice was the reworked advertisement. Using a key he made for himself, KAWS opened the display cases of bus shelters and phone booths and painted his own characters into the ads inside, which were often left up for months, a habit he later carried to Paris, London, Berlin and Tokyo. Among the ads he reworked, by his own account, was a Warhol Absolut poster that a collector commissioned him to paint over. Going through Absolut’s archive for this project, he told Dazed that handling the actual pieces brought back images from his youth, and that he spent time with the original Ed Ruscha painting among the racks.

The rest of the arc is well documented. COMPANION, the figure with crossbones and X-ed out eyes, arrived as a vinyl toy in 1999 and built an early following, especially in Japan, while CHUM, the character fronting the new bottle, is loosely based on Michelin’s Bibendum, better known as the Michelin Man. In 2019 THE KAWS ALBUM, a 2005 painting that restages the Sgt. Pepper’s cover with Simpsons-style characters, sold at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong for $14.8 million, more than fourteen times its high estimate. His public works have been just as outsized, among them KAWS: Holiday, an enormous inflatable COMPANION that floated in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour during Art Basel Hong Kong in 2019. His exhibition history now runs from New York and London to Vienna, Melbourne and Tokyo.

Bottles are not new territory for him, and neither is mass retail. He has designed small-run bottles for Hennessy and Dos Equis before, and his longest commercial relationship runs through UNIQLO, which has released his work since 2016 and made him its first Artist in Residence in 2025. He has already shared walls with Warhol, too: The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh paired the two in KAWS + Warhol, which opened in May 2024. In the same Dazed conversation, asked why he keeps working with companies whose reach is global, KAWS argued that “the exclusivity card has been played so hard” that it no longer convinces anyone.

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The design splits cleanly in two. The front belongs to the XX and CHUM; the back reproduces the commissioned canvas. Absolut presents that painting as the seed of the project rather than a bonus, and KAWS has described it as a direct record of whatever was happening in his studio when he made it, meant to connect visually to that moment instead of standing apart as a branded exercise. That framing matters for an artist whose paintings and sculptures tend to arrive in series. The Absolut canvas reads as one more entry in an ongoing body of work that happens to have a vodka bottle in it, rather than an outside assignment. Asked by Dazed what he wants to explore now, he said it has not really changed: make something, send it out, and see what the public does with it, which he likened to tossing a note in a bottle into the ocean. The comparison lands a little differently when the bottle in question is bound for more than 30 countries.

 

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In the announcement, KAWS said he was excited to join the lineage of artists who had made work for Absolut’s ads, and grateful for the chance to put his work on the bottle itself. “My goal is to allow art to meet people in unexpected places,” he said, adding that he hoped the bottles would be enjoyed at gatherings around the world. Caroline Begley, Absolut’s US vice president of marketing, described the edition as a witty object equally suited to a collector’s shelf or the middle of a party, and as a statement of the brand’s belief that great art should be accessible to everyone.

That double audience is the interesting tension in the project. KAWS has spent three decades selling to both camps at once, putting the same characters on museum-scale bronzes and on T-shirts at chain-store prices, and the Absolut bottle sits squarely between them: a mass-produced consumer good with a painting on its back, limited by a sales window rather than an edition number. It also fits the way Absolut has been working lately, pairing its bottle with food brands and music festivals as often as with painters, while keeping the artist editions as its most direct line back to its own advertising history.

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In the US, the edition went up for pre-order at Absolut.com on October 1, with bottles rolling out to select retailers for a limited time while supplies last. Internationally, Absolut lists more than 30 markets from the same date, naming the UK, Germany, Spain, Mexico, China, Italy, New Zealand, Poland and Korea among them. Neither announcement gives a retail price, and the edition is limited by time and stock rather than by a stated number of bottles.

Japan does not appear on the published market list, a notable gap for an artist whose toys found some of their earliest collectors there and whose latest UNIQLO collection landed in September. The country has carried Absolut artist bottles before: the 2014 Absolut Andy Warhol Edition arrived in Japan with an allocation of 5,200 bottles. Either the KAWS edition follows that route had not been confirmed at the time of writing.

In Stockholm, Spritmuseum’s survey of Absolut’s advertising runs until March 2028, drawn from the same archive KAWS walked through before he started painting. Forty-one years after Warhol’s first canvas, the artist who once painted over one of those Warhol posters now has his own work printed on the bottle itself, headed for shelves in more than 30 markets.