Takashi Murakami
Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
April 11 - May 10, 2003
Marianne Boesky Gallery presents a new exhibition of works by Takashi Murakami.
Over the last five years, Takashi Murakami has emerged as the leading force in the encouragement, articulation and development of an only recently acknowledged contemporary Japanese art culture. As an artist, theorist, and curator, he has put forward an elaborately conceived view combining a thorough understanding of western modernism, traditional Japanese art history, and contemporary consumer culture.
This spring, Takashi Murakami unveils a new collaboration with Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs. He was invited to collaborate with the designer on a new line of handbags and merchandise, even going so far as to redesign and update their logo. The product launch in Louis Vuitton stores has already begun.
At the same time, for his third solo exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery, Takashi Murakami collaborates using his own designs and characters created for Louis Vuitton in another context. The paintings and sculptures will display the elaborate and colorful motifs emblazoned on these commercial products. The surfaces and attention to detail are signature to Murakami’s style of art making. Other than the content, these paintings still contain the elements of Murakami’s true painting—superflat, minimalism, abstraction, and representation. By boldly agreeing to do this project, Murakami moves beyond the art of merely appropriating pop culture imagery, to an all too questionable realm of art as commerce. As Murakami continually emphasizes, the boundaries between commercial works and fine art is malleable, and the patterns and decorations of both can be illuminating.
Takashi Murakami’s aesthetic agenda encompasses myriad activities. Along with the many exhibitions of his artwork (including solo exhibitions at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, Serpentine Gallery in London, Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, Boston Museum of Fine Art), he has curated several important exhibitions, such as “SUPERFLAT” and “Coloriage”, which champion a specifically Japan-centric view of modern and contemporary visual culture. Murakami also has organized his own art festivals in Japan (called “Geisai”), and he continues to design and market consumer goods—t-shirts, watches, mousepads, postcards, etc.—disseminating his signature images to an increasingly wider cultural spectrum.
MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY
509 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011
