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on Tuesday December 10 at noon, Takashi Murakami will launch an exclusive 200-item-only T-Shirt Drop at the Gagosian Shop in Burlington Arcade!
The Japanese artist Takashi Murakami is most famous for his polychromatic smiling cartoon flowers, the stand-out iconography from his unique and colourful Japanese-pop-and-geek-culture universe of “Superflat”. His collaborations with the likes of Virgil Abloh, Louis Vuitton, Kaws, and even Google, have propelled him to a position as one of the art world’s most identifiable names, reaching both fame and success in the manner of a Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst - two artists he regularly cites.
The exhibition at Gagosian in London is remarkable as it cuts through any superficiality of this fame and brings to the fore a clear seriousness in Murakami’s work.
Works like Rakuchū-Rakugai-zu Byōbu: Iwasa Matabei RIP (above, detail: top) see the artist revisit the classic art of Japan from the 17th and 18th centuries, taking the frankly awe-inspiring originals and “Murakamizing” them with signature details - a smiling flower here, a fluorescent dinosaur there - to quietly subvert the appearance of these masterpieces.
In other pieces he happily works the balance the other way, with overtly “Marukami” paintings rendered as if through a classical Japanese art filter.
“We want to see the future, even if only momentarily. It is the moment in which, even if we don’t completely understand what we have glimpsed, we are nonetheless touched by it. This is what we have come to call art” - Murakami
The combined effect shows a masterful ability to mix the clearly contemporary with the highly traditional, throwing them into relief against each other and inviting us to consider the vast differences of art then and art now - at the same time establishing an historical resonance with the dialectic of “Western” art and “Eastern” art, an important topic when many of these works were originally produced as Japan had only recently abandoned its policy of isolation from the wider world.
Born in Tokyo in 1962, Murakami was formally trained in the Japanese nihonga style - a contemporary term coined to differentiate it from Yōga or Western-style painting - although it is indicative of his mischievous character that he always insists his entry into the Tokyo University of the Arts was necessitated by a lack of academic prowess rather than any actual desire to attend. He came out of university a different person though, newly obsessed by Japanese art and how it fit into the wider art world.
“First and foremost, I see myself as a painter” - Murakami
It was when Murakami travelled to New York that the otaku - “geek” - side of his character really came out and Superflat, his self-styled movement grew. He had always been obsessed by manga, anime, and Japanese pop culture and worked this into his own high-art style. The playful, intense, and above all highly informed Murakami has gone on to be widely celebrated for mixing high and low culture, working between art and luxury, and straddling art and commerce.
On Wednesday, December 11, Murakami will be in conversation about his work and the exhibition with Serpentine’s Hans Ulrich Obrist at London’s Royal Academy of Arts.
Alongside the Grosvenor Square exhibition, Murakami also takes over the Gagosian Shop in nearby Burlington Arcade. With an exhibition of new smiling flowers paintings in the upstairs gallery, and prints and merchandise in the Shop itself, you can grab yourself a piece of the magic in time for Christmas.
all images © 2024 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy Gagosian
