Takashi Murakami - Contemporary Art Part II New York Friday, May 14, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

  • Catalogue Essay

    © 2004 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
    “We want to see the newest things. That is because 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.” (T. Murakami, Superflat, Tokyo, 2000)
    Breaking the barriers of Japanese contemporary art, Takashi Murakami is best known to represent his culture by applying Japanese animation onto canvas. In a Warhol fashion, Murakami takes the everyday mundane and turns it into fine art. Similar to the “Pop” pioneer, Murakami displays his oeuvre of work through painting, sculpture, and printmaking as well. In Jellyfish eyes—Max & Shimon in the Strange Forest, Murakami demonstrates a Zen-like composition of evenly dispersed graphics surrounding the comiclike subject matter of the animated characters Max & Shimon. The colorful graphics based on a galaxy black background not only enhances the fantasyworld of Japanese animation but the viewer is embraced with the emotions of the subject matter. In its “Superflat” style, the artist becomes the creator of his fantasy work and at the same time, directly represents Japanese contemporary culture in an art form which can be comprehended by a mass audience around the globe.

  • Artist Biography

    Takashi Murakami

    Japanese • 1962

    Takashi Murakami is best known for his contemporary combination of fine art and pop culture. He uses recognizable iconography like Mickey Mouse and cartoonish flowers and infuses it with Japanese culture. The result is a boldly colorful body of work that takes the shape of paintings, sculptures and animations.

    In the 1990s, Murakami founded the Superflat movement in an attempt to expose the "shallow emptiness of Japanese consumer culture." The artist plays on the familiar aesthetic of mangas, Japanese-language comics, to render works that appear democratic and accessible, all the while denouncing the universality and unspecificity of consumer goods. True to form, Murakami has done collaborations with numerous brands and celebrities including Kanye West, Louis Vuitton, Pharrell Williams and Google.

    View More Works

Property from the Halsey Minor Collection

211

Jellyfish Eyes - MAX & Shimon in the Strange Forest

2004

Acrylic on canvas mounted on board.

59 x 59 in. (150 x 150 cm).



Signed and dated “Takashi 04” on the reverse.

Estimate
$400,000 - 600,000 

Sold for $530,500

Contemporary Art Part II

14 May 2010
New York