Gagosian Gallery Britannia Street
6-24 Britannia Street
London WC1X 9JD
June 27 - August 5, 2011
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present recent paintings and sculptures by Takashi Murakami.
Murakami’s latest group of paintings explores his complex ambivalence to the legacy of cosmopolitan painter Kuroda Seiki, who brought yōga or Western-style painting to Meiji- period Japan. Kuroda broadly promoted the genre of history painting, as well as the validity of the nude figure as a subject for art. Taking Kuroda’s famous triptych, Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment (c.1900), Murakami consciously reclaims it in a new iteration by applying traditional nihonga techniques like gold- and silver-leafing, as well as recasting the realistically rendered nude figures in contemporary manga style. By the Edo period, the long-established genre of shunga sought to express a varied world of contemporary sexual possibilities, often referred to as the creation of a “pornotopia,” an idealised, eroticised and fantastical world parallel to contemporary urban life. In Murakami’s contemporary shunga, graphic depictions of exaggerated and engorged male and female genitals are set against delirious backgrounds of image and pattern.
This theme continues into sculptures, which feature collaborations with key artists working in Japan’s popular otaku culture including Seiji Matsuyama -- creator of the controversial manga “My Wife is an Elementary School Student” – and BOME, a figure sculptor who previously collaborated on Murakami’s first life-size sculpture, Miss Ko2 (1997), an ebullient Playboy fantasy translated into manga cuteness and proportions. 3-Meter Girl (2011) is an absurdist composition that pushes form and content to new extremes. She stands with feet spread wide, her abundant hair roiling around her like an elaborate rococo frame as if to steady her petite body against the whopping pendular breasts whose size and weight threaten to topple her.
For further inquiries please contact the gallery at london@gagosian.com or at +44.207.841.9960.
To read the full press release (click): Murakami @ Gagosian Britannia Street
