© MURAKAMI at Brooklyn Museum on artrepublic.com
Exhibition running from Apr 05 2008
until Jul 13 2008
The most comprehensive retrospective to date of the work of internationally acclaimed Japanese artist Takashi Murakami will be presented at the Brooklyn Museum from April 5 through July 13, 2008. The exhibition © MURAKAMI, will include more than ninety works in various media that span the artist’s entire career, installed in more than 18,500 square feet of gallery space. Born in Tokyo in 1962, Murakami is one of the most influential and acclaimed artists to have emerged from Asia in the late twentieth century, creating a wide-ranging body of work that consciously bridges fine art, design, animation, fashion, and popular culture. He received a Ph.D. from the prestigious Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, where he was trained in the school of traditional Japanese painting known as Nihonga, a nineteenth-century mixture of Western and Eastern styles. However, the prevailing popularity of anime (animation) and manga (comic books) directed his interest toward the art of animation because, as he has said, "it was more representative of modern day Japanese life." American popular culture in the form of animation, comics, and fashion are among the influences his work which includes painting, sculpture, installation, and animation, as well as a wide range of collectibles, multiples, and commercial products. The contrast of opposites is a recurring theme throughout Murakami’s work: Good and evil, sweetness and perversion, humor and darkness. Often work that seems bright and playful reveals a darker side upon close examination: the seemingly cheerful mushroom shapes that are ubiquitous in his work, for example, may be read as a reference to the mushroom clouds of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Among the works included in this large-scale survey tracing the trajectory of Murakami’s artistic development are many of his acclaimed sculpture figures including the 23-foot-high Tongari-kun (2003-4); Miss Ko2 (1997), a long-legged waitress who has become one of the artist’s signature characters; Hiropon (1997), a Japanese girl jumping a rope created by milk spurting from her gargantuan breasts; DOB in the Strange Forest, in which a benign and innocent DOB figure encounters a group of menacing mushrooms; and Second Mission Project Ko2 (2007), reprising the Miss Ko2 character, now transformed into a jet airplane. Among the paintings on view will be Tan Tan Bo (2001), as well as Tan Tan Bo Puking—a.k.a. Gero Tan (2002), in which DOB has evolved into a gigantic, sharp-toothed monster, with unknown substances oozing from his mouth; Flower ball (3D) (2002), a decorative work comprising dozens of Murakami’s famous flowers; and Superflat Jellyfish Eyes 1 and 2 (2003). OPENING HOURS: Wed - Fri: 10.00 - 17.00, Sat & Sun: 11.00 - 18.00 Image Credits: Image 1: Takashi Murakami Flower ball (3D), 2002, Acrylic on canvas mounted on board, 39 3/8 inches diameter, 1 15/16 inches depth, Private Collection, courtesy of Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris and Miami, ©2002 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved Image 2: Takashi Murakami, DOB in the Strange Forest, 1999, FRP Resin, fiber glass, and acrylic, 59 3/4 x 119 3/4 in.Courtesy of Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, Photo by Kazuo Fukunaga, ©1999 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved Silde Show: Takashi Murakami, Tan Tan Bo Puking - a.k.a. Gero Tan, 2002, Acrylic on canvas mounted on board141 3/4 x 283 7/16 x 2 5/8 in.Collection of Amalia Dayan and Adam LindemannCourtesy of Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris and Miami, ©2002 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved Takashi Murakami, Tan Tan Bo, 2001 Acrylic on canvas mounted on board141 3/4 x 212 5/8 x 2 5/8 in.Collection of John A. Smith and Victoria Hughes, Courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, ©2001 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved  |
