Since emerging onto the contemporary art scene, Takashi Murakami's work has done so much to challenge all that is held as sacred and sacrosanct within the domain of high art. The viewer is confronted by a forty two year old artist who has a grown progressively in stature since an initial spate of small scale exhibitions in his native Japan in 1995. Since then, Murakami has progressed as an artist to a level where his name can be heard in the same breath as Warhol, Pollock and De Koonig, mooted as someone that can join the upper echelons of the artistic hierarchy in the twenty-first century.
Originally based and working from a studio in Asaka City, Japan, Takashi Murakami quickly established a large scale studio of assistants, taking influence from the work habits of Andy Warhol. Indeed, the Warholian similarities do not end there, for his work draws heavily from the fields of consumer culture, for so long an area deeply imbued in Warhol's art.
Murakami paints in the self titled style of superflat, a method whereby everything within the image is portrayed in two dimensions only, and one that he used extensively during his commissioned work as a designer in 2003 for Louis Vuitton. But the superflat technique finds its origins in far less contemporary surroundings than couture fashion, since it draws upon traditional Japanese techniques pioneered by the panel and screen painters of the sixteenth century. This superflat technique can be seen as a common link between every piece in this exhibition, from his signature DOB characters, through the Pollock-esque TanTanBo, and onto his latest prints, LV Monogram Superflat.
He also did the artwork for Kanye West's album (Graduation).
I was so mad when i got there to find out there aren't any cameras allowed gRrR!
z0bananas
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