Final month on the Columbarium funeral residence in San Francisco, mourners gathered for the artist Frank Kozik, who died not too long ago at 61.

The copper-domed rotunda on Loraine Court docket was crammed with bikers and musicians from the Bay Space, together with artists who took half within the Lowbrow motion, the California pop surrealism scene from which Mr. Kozik emerged in his 30s. Some company wore flannel shirts and leather-based jackets. One man with silver hair wore a Hells Angels vest.

Within the Nineties, Mr. Kozik attained underground fame together with his Day-Glo silk-screen live performance posters for Nirvana, Pearl Jam, 9 Inch Nails and different bands, shaping the visible language for the grunge and various rock actions. Within the early 2000s, alongside artists like KAWS and Futura 2000, he was a pioneer within the artwork toy growth, producing a whole bunch of mischievous animal collectible figurines that turned coveted by collectors.

Mr. Kozik’s best-known creation, a cigarette-puffing rabbit character referred to as Labbit, is without doubt one of the most recognizable vinyl designer toys ever made. He launched a lot of his creations with Kidrobot, a retailer that launched artwork toys to the mainstream by collaborations with the band Gorillaz, the designer Marc Jacobs and the Museum of Trendy Artwork. Exterior Kidrobot shops, there have been usually strains for Mr. Kozik’s newest drops, predating right this moment’s hypebeast tradition.

As Mr. Kozik’s associates stood as much as learn tributes, a display displayed his posters for Soundgarden and Sonic Youth, in addition to photographs of his toys, like a Labbit branded with the anarchist image. A rendition of his 1993 Nirvana poster, depicting two kids operating throughout a discipline to hug an antennaed creature with bug eyes, accompanied this system.

At a gathering open to the general public later that night, Mr. Kozik’s followers would have the prospect to mourn his loss of life, however this ceremony was saved intimate. Sharon Kozik, his spouse and enterprise supervisor, watched whereas a pal learn the eulogy Ms. Kozik had written.

“Frank constructed his life by making his personal selections,” it stated. “Tragically, for causes I don’t know or perceive, he determined to finish his life on his personal phrases.”

Mr. Kozik died by suicide at his residence on Might 6.

“I do know all of us need causes, nevertheless it’s not that straightforward,” Ms. Kozik stated in an interview every week after the service. “There was Kozik, after which there was Frank.”

“Whenever you take a look at his work,” she continued, “it’s humorous, nevertheless it’s additionally darkish and daring, and that’s how he was as an individual. So far as his loss of life, all I’ve to say is what was in my eulogy, which is that I don’t perceive it. However I feel it’s all proper there in his work.”

Deconstructing Pop Tradition

For 40 years, Mr. Kozik plucked imagery from American popular culture and twisted it into the playfully violent visuals that turned his signature.

For example a double invoice for Stone Temple Pilots and Butthole Surfers, for instance, he depicted a cherubic schoolgirl holding a bloody cleaver and a platter topped with Jerry Garcia’s severed head. He as soon as designed a Labbit suited up in leather-based bondage gear, its mouth zipped shut. He used recurring motifs like Charles Manson’s mug shot, voluptuous satan women and a hard-living, unshaven Fred Flintstone.

“All I do is eat the mountain of pap that surrounds us,” Mr. Kozik as soon as wrote, “and extrude it in what I feel is a extra palatable type.”

Since his loss of life, a few of Mr. Kozik’s followers have been dismayed that his legacy hasn’t been acknowledged extra prominently by the artwork world, particularly on the East Coast, the place a lot of its gatekeepers lie. But when the artwork neighborhood’s response has been muted, that has solely solidified Mr. Kozik’s status as a roguish outsider.

“Kozik was a punk rock Warhol,” stated the artist Shepard Fairey. “He was all about subverting tradition. However whereas Warhol was hanging out with the Rolling Stones and the attractive individuals, Frank was listening to Black Sabbath and chain-smoking and never making associates. Even his most well-known character, Labbit, it’d look cute, nevertheless it’s about subverting tradition. Kozik noticed his work as a Trojan Horse to seize individuals’s consideration earlier than reminding them that each one isn’t excellent in paradise.”

“He wasn’t good at sucking as much as the institution,” Mr. Fairey continued. “The artists who enter artwork historical past are incessantly the individuals sucking as much as the individuals who write artwork historical past. I’d like that my work be remembered, so I’m keen to play the sport to a level, however Kozik didn’t have endurance for that. To listen to he’s now been unsung, I feel, is one thing he’d have enjoyable being bitter about.”

As Mr. Kozik informed it in interviews, his penchant for defiance could possibly be traced to his youth.

Born in 1962, he was raised in Madrid throughout Francisco Franco’s dictatorial regime. His father was an American serviceman, his mom a Spanish aristocrat. After they divorced, he grew up together with his mom’s household, which he as soon as described as a “bizarre, rich, super-old-fashioned family of fascists.” When he visited his father in California, he was tantalized by American popular culture, so he moved to reside with him when he was a youngster.

Within the suburbs of Sacramento, Mr. Kozik embraced the slackerish counterculture of the Seventies, holing up in his bed room listening to Pink Floyd whereas studying comics like Heavy Metallic. After a falling out together with his father, who struggled with alcoholism, he dropped out of highschool and fled his residence. He joined the Air Drive at 18 and was stationed at a navy base close to Austin, Texas. It was there, within the metropolis’s punk scene, that Mr. Kozik discovered his calling.

After his navy service, he labored in development by day and immersed himself in venues like Membership Foot and Cannibal Membership at evening. He tried becoming a member of a band however realized that he was a hopeless musician, so he began making fliers with a Xerox machine for native teams like Scratch Acid and Butthole Surfers.

He stapled his fliers to phone posts round city, and other people quickly started to note the scrawl at their backside: “Kozik.” His legend grew when he made a copyright-defiling mural for a membership referred to as Emo’s: It depicted the Flintstone household and their pet, Dino, engaged in X-rated acts.

“I used to be a part of the trash world,” Mr. Kozik stated in a 2018 interview. “I used to be a no-education loser individual and was undoubtedly into hedonistic experiences. Whereas I’ve an appreciation of effective artwork and I perceive it, I used to be going to punk rock exhibits, not faculty nor museums. The entire stuff that actually turned my crank was that stuff.”

“Watch out what you want for,” he added. “Punk has knowledgeable all the things, from low to excessive, in that all the things is now atavistic. And that’s utterly regular to the purpose the place punk itself is the least fascinating factor ever. It gained, that darkish facet, the hedonism and anti-intellectual.”

When Mr. Kozik started producing his large silk-screen posters, he began receiving commissions from bands passing by Austin, together with Crimson Sizzling Chili Peppers and Neil Younger. Rolling Stone revealed an article crediting him with reviving rock live performance posters as an American artwork type. He additionally directed the music video for Soundgarden’s “Fairly Noose” and designed the artwork for “Americana,” an Offspring album.

“It’s not an overstatement to say Kozik created the period’s visible language,” stated Josh Homme, the frontman of Queens of the Stone Age. “For those who have been in an alternate band on the time, you needed a poster by Kozik, as a result of it was its personal stamp of approval into the scene. And in case your band was horrible, you weren’t going to get one.”

By the mid-Nineties, Mr. Kozik had moved to San Francisco and pivoted to indie report mogul, founding Man’s Spoil Data, which put out some 200 albums, singles and EPs by bands together with Queens of the Stone Age, Kyuss, Melvins and Excessive on Hearth. Mr. Kozik created the paintings for the label’s releases. Man’s Ruins Data additionally had its personal poster printing operation, and its warehouse headquarters turned a hangout for the Lowbrow neighborhood.

However after a speedy enlargement, it went bankrupt, leaving Mr. Kozik looking for his subsequent metamorphosis.

He discovered it on journeys to Tokyo, the place the artwork toy motion was taking form. A punk streetwear model, Bounty Hunter, was distributing a limited-edition figurine of a boy sporting a cranium and crossbones sailor cap, and youngsters have been lining up outdoors its store within the Harajuku district to get one. A toy firm, Medicom, was additionally producing a plastic teddy bear with a paunch stomach. Drawn to the medium’s prospects, Mr. Kozik sketched Labbit at an izakaya one evening, intending it as a play on Hey Kitty.

“The preliminary idea for the Labbit is he’s who Kitty booty calls at 3 a.m.,” Mr. Kozik stated. “He’s unemployed, he’s soiled, he’s nasty, however he’s form of sizzling.”

Quickly he was designing varied Labbits and different toys for Kidrobot, an organization based by Paul Budnitz, an entrepreneur from Berkeley, who was additionally enchanted by the craze.

At its peak Kidrobot had shops in London, Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Manhattan. It collaborated on collectible figurines with Snoop Dogg and MF Doom. Crossing into vogue, it launched a set of toys that wore designs by Jil Sander, Dries Van Noten and Rick Owens, and Barneys New York bought a line of its sneakers and hoodies. However after Mr. Budnitz left the corporate, the model’s edge dulled, and most of its shops closed just a few years later.

Mr. Kozik was then appointed Kidrobot’s inventive director, but the scene was already transitioning into its subsequent iteration. Because the effective artwork world embraced the work of designers like KAWS, Mr. Kozik turned a celeb at conventions like DesignerCon and Comedian Con. Collectors usually cornered him to autograph their toys, and younger artists sought his mentorship.

Ron English, a pop artist and toymaker recognized for his nightmarish Ronald McDonald figurine, thought-about Mr. Kozik’s legacy. “He’s the man who was all the time there first,” he stated. “He’s the man who paved the freeway so a KAWS may run down it.”

The Final Interview

As Mr. Kozik entered his 50s, he discovered himself in a fast-changing San Francisco. He lived in the identical rent-controlled condo that he’d moved into within the Nineties and spent his working hours in a studio above a motorbike restore store with the corporate of his Bengal cat, Eddie. He took on occasional poster jobs for bands like Primus and Blink-182, though designing toys remained his precedence. He additionally turned engrossed with NFTs, adapting Labbits into digital fashions.

After marrying a photographer, Sharon Selden, in 2009, a few of his tough edges softened. “He’d developed his persona through the years, however he didn’t should be Kozik with me,” she stated. “He lightened up. I took him to a sugar egg making class. And he did one thing he as soon as stated he’d by no means do, which was come to Disneyland with me.”

However to his followers, Mr. Kozik’s punk stature loomed giant, and he was characteristically stoic one afternoon in March when he sat at an arts heart in Haight-Ashbury for what can be his final interview.

Sporting a black fleece with its sleeves rolled up, his forearm tattoos of sparrows carrying skulls seen, he talked with a Belgian filmmaker, Olivier Piérart, who’s engaged on a documentary in regards to the tradition of rock live performance poster design.

Within the interview footage, which was considered for this text, Mr. Kozik sips from a espresso mug and seems lower than enthusiastic as he discusses the imagery he created three a long time in the past.

However his temper modified when he was requested a heavy query.

“Some individuals suppose you’re not appreciated,” Mr. Piérart stated. “Have you learnt why?”

“If individuals don’t recognize what I’ve accomplished, that’s effective,” Mr. Kozik replied. “That doesn’t matter to me. I didn’t do it to be appreciated.”

He added: “That is who I’m.”