Takashi Murakami - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 13, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

  • Catalogue Essay

    Murakami’s practice has engaged in a symbolic play of consumption through strategies of branding, historical parody, spectacular forms of excess, anonymity, and the futility of desire.                                                                                                                                                        M. Yoshitake, “The meaning of the nonsense of excess,” ©MURAKAMI, Los Angeles p. 126.
    Eye Love SUPERFLAT, is arguably one of Takashi Murakami’s most iconic neo-pop works. His use of Louis Vuitton’s globally recognized monogram is now synonymous with his superflat ideology – an ideology which perversely feeds on an insatiable consumer culture desire for luxury, branding, and status.
    Murakami successfully parodies the juxtaposition of the Louis Vuitton monogram, one of the fashion world’s oldest and most prestigious luxury retailers, with his now iconic cartoon, anime-styled jellyfish eyes. The resulting vibrant and sumptuously luxurious candy-colorized monogram fusion perpetuates the never ending discourse of high versus low art – the high end luxury brand conspicuously akin with the nonsensical wide-eyed jellyfish eyes.
    Artwork ©2006 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved

  • 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

21

Eye Love SUPERFLAT

2006
Acrylic on canvas mounted on board.
39 3/8 x 39 3/8 in. (100 x 100 cm).
Signed and dated “Takashi Murakami 06” on the reverse.

Estimate
$300,000 - 400,000 

Sold for $302,500

Contemporary Art Part I

13 Nov 2008, 7pm
New York