Takashi Murakami - Contemporary Art Day Sale New York Tuesday, November 12, 2013 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Pinksummer, Genova
    Private Collection

  • Exhibited

    Shibuya, Tokyo, Parco Gallery, DOB in the Strange Forest, April 1999
    Genova, Pinksummer, Murakami and Manetas, February 2000

  • Literature

    F. Bonami, C. Christov-Bakargiev, The Pantagruel Syndrome, Torino: Skira, 2005, pp. 122-123

  • Catalogue Essay

    A giant of Contemporary Art, Japanese artist Takashi Murakami has smoothly transitioned back and forth between a wide range of roles: artist, curator, product designer, entrepreneur, theorist, and celebrity phenomenon. His work is featured not only in some of the world’s most important museums (the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, Bilbao, etc.) but has even successfully infiltrated the spheres of popular culture and high fashion in a brazen and unstinting way that outdoes even Andy Warhol’s most intrepid forays into mass consumerism.


    Murakami quickly rose to prominence in the 1990s through the development of his Superflat aesthetic and mantra. This style combines the fatness of traditional Japanese painting’s picture plane with the two dimensionality of American Pop Art. It also embraces much of contemporary Japanese culture, most notably elements from otaku, a subculture that celebrates, in a rather fetishistic manner, the fantastical, hypersexualized, and saccharine figures of anime (animated film) and manga (comic books). The bright psychedelic colors, crisp lines, cutesy characters, and uninterrupted fatness of Mushroom Dob (I-Dob), 1999, make this work a stellar example of all that best characterizes Murakami’s Superfat style.

  • 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

164

Mushroom Dob (I-Dob)

1999
acrylic on canvas, laid on panel
23 5/8 x 23 5/8 in. (60 x 60 cm.)
Signed and dated “Takashi 99” on the reverse; further stamped “TAKASHI FIRST IN QUALITY AROUND THE WORLD, Takashi Co. LTD., Made in Japan, Hiropon Factory” on the reverse.

Estimate
$150,000 - 200,000 

Sold for $185,000

Contact Specialist
Amanda Stoffel
Head of Day Sale
astoffel@phillips.com
+1 212 940 1261

Contemporary Art Day Sale

New York 12 November 2013 11AM