The most comprehensive retrospective to date of the work of internationally acclaimed Japanese artist Takashi Murakami will be presented at the Brooklyn Museum April 5 to July 13. The exhibition, “© Murakami,” will include more than 90 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 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 PhD from the 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 exhibition explores the self-reflexive nature of Murakami’s oeuvre by focusing on earlier work produced between 1992 and 2000 in which the artist attempts to explore his own reality through an investigation of branding and identity, as well as through self-portraiture created since 2000.
In 1993, in a continuing project to brand his own identity, Murakami created an alter ego named Dob, whose name was taken from a line made famous by the late Japanese comedian Yuri Toru that asked the existential question Dobojite dobojite ? (Why? Why?). As the complexities of Murakami’s examination of his own identity evolved, so did Dob, in painting and inflatable form, morphing from a strand of DNA to a balloonlike form with innocent eyes.
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 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.
The exhibition was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Following the Brooklyn presentation, which will be the only other US venue, the exhibition will travel to the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (October 27⁊anuary 4, 2009) and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (February⁍ay 2009).
The Brooklyn Museum is at 200 Eastern Parkway. For information, 718-638-5000 or www.brooklynmuseum.org .
