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Lot Essay
‘Here comes the time when, vibrating on its stem, every flower fumes like a censer; noises and perfumes circle in the evening air.’
—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
A spectacle of pulsating colour and illusionistic depth and volume, Takashi Murakami’s Flower Ball (Algae Ball) (2002) seems to blossom into the viewer’s space, the artist’s iconic smiling flower motif repeated and stretched across the circular canvas in order to produce the impression of a ball colourfully bulging out from the wall. Imbued not only with the kawaii culture of cuteness that pervades certain kinds of manga and anime illustration and animation, but the spirit of classical Japanese treatments of flower motifs like Ogata Kōrin’s irises, the work offers a charming, witty take on the history of Japanese visual forms and their relationship to Western traditions of perspective.
Extensively trained in the ancient pictorial tradition of nihonga and a hyper-literate student of Japanese art history, Murakami’s art is underpinned by the artist’s ambitiously far-reaching body of theoretical work, his art and writing alike interrogations of the relationship – and the fundamental differences – between Eastern and Western art. Central to his work is his theory of the ‘superflat’, or the tendency across Japanese pictorial traditions to see the world in terms of surfaces rather than depths, and Flower Ball (Algae Ball), with its beguilingly deceptive sense of three-dimensionality reduced to the plane of the canvas, seems to embody this sense of a specifically Japanese ‘superflatness.’ Speaking about his Flower Ball series of paintings, Murakami has said that he wanted to achieve a kind of non-Western perspective ‘without using the procedures of traditional perspective.’ As he explains, ‘one has the impression that the motif is convex, that it is in three dimensions, but, to achieve that effect, I made absolutely no use of shadows, for example. You will note however that the petals in the foreground and their outlines are very much enlarged, and as you work out towards the edges, the size and the lines gradually get smaller and thinner. The effect produces an illusion of space or rather, of volume… I wanted to offer the vision of a form of illusion different from the one we find in Western painting’ (T. Murakami, quoted in Takashi Murakami Kaikai Kiki, exh. cat., Paris and London, 2002, p. 85).
—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
A spectacle of pulsating colour and illusionistic depth and volume, Takashi Murakami’s Flower Ball (Algae Ball) (2002) seems to blossom into the viewer’s space, the artist’s iconic smiling flower motif repeated and stretched across the circular canvas in order to produce the impression of a ball colourfully bulging out from the wall. Imbued not only with the kawaii culture of cuteness that pervades certain kinds of manga and anime illustration and animation, but the spirit of classical Japanese treatments of flower motifs like Ogata Kōrin’s irises, the work offers a charming, witty take on the history of Japanese visual forms and their relationship to Western traditions of perspective.
Extensively trained in the ancient pictorial tradition of nihonga and a hyper-literate student of Japanese art history, Murakami’s art is underpinned by the artist’s ambitiously far-reaching body of theoretical work, his art and writing alike interrogations of the relationship – and the fundamental differences – between Eastern and Western art. Central to his work is his theory of the ‘superflat’, or the tendency across Japanese pictorial traditions to see the world in terms of surfaces rather than depths, and Flower Ball (Algae Ball), with its beguilingly deceptive sense of three-dimensionality reduced to the plane of the canvas, seems to embody this sense of a specifically Japanese ‘superflatness.’ Speaking about his Flower Ball series of paintings, Murakami has said that he wanted to achieve a kind of non-Western perspective ‘without using the procedures of traditional perspective.’ As he explains, ‘one has the impression that the motif is convex, that it is in three dimensions, but, to achieve that effect, I made absolutely no use of shadows, for example. You will note however that the petals in the foreground and their outlines are very much enlarged, and as you work out towards the edges, the size and the lines gradually get smaller and thinner. The effect produces an illusion of space or rather, of volume… I wanted to offer the vision of a form of illusion different from the one we find in Western painting’ (T. Murakami, quoted in Takashi Murakami Kaikai Kiki, exh. cat., Paris and London, 2002, p. 85).