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Lot Essay
“I’d been thinking about the reality of Japanese drawing and painting and how it is different from Western art. What is important in Japanese art is the feeling of flatness. Our culture doesn’t have 3-D” – Takashi Murakami
High and low, ancient and modern, oriental and occidental, contemporary Japanese artist Takashi Murakami moves freely within the ever-expanding field of art, commerce, and pop culture. Employing a distinctive “Superflat” style and ethos, which merges traditional Japanese painting techniques with the spirit of American Pop, anime, and otaku culture, Murakami goes “back into his catalogue of motifs and references, chew(s) them up, and spit(s) them back out in a newly reimagined form.” (M. Darling, Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats its Own Leg, Chicago, 2017, p.22). Both Posi Mushrooms and Homage to Francis Bacon (Study for Head of George Dyer (on light ground)) reveal this lineage of artistic influences melding into Murakami’s three-decade long exploration of painting.
Executed in 2002, Posi Mushrooms is an exquisite example of Murakami’s early engagement with the spore-laden fungus. Depicting a panoply of variegated fungi characters arranged neatly against a silver background, Murakami paints them with animated personalities. Sometimes sweet, sometimes menacing, these mushrooms are given big round eyes and cartoon eyelashes. Unlike Itō Jakuchū’s lateeighteenth century handscroll, which features a more naturalistic rendering of vegetables and insects, Murakami not only references the historical significance of mushrooms in Japanese visual culture, but also bodies forth a unique aesthetic of his own. As observed by Peter Daszak and Sara E. Howard, mushrooms “repeatedly (appear) in traditional Japanese art” and thus became a subject, or symbol, in which the contemporary and the historical collide (P. Daszak and S.E. Howard, ‘Fungal Foray’, Eco Health 9, 2012, p.103).
Often compared to Andy Warhol’s fixation of the “surface”, art critics understand Murakami’s “Superflat” to be a further elaboration into a particularly Japanese reality. It is an aesthetic predicated on the dissolution of Western distinctions such as high/low and art/ craft, which do not exist within “the horizontally organised nature of Japanese culture” (D. Hebdige, “Flat Boy vs. Skinny: Takashi Murakami and the Battle of ‘Japan’”,Murakami, Los Angeles, 2008, p.22). For Murakami, Posi Mushrooms is therefore a reimagination and expansion of traditional Japanese motifs within a contemporary commercial landscape, which ultimately probes further into the construction of culture.
Since 2004, Murakami began working on a series of works that paid homage to Irish-born British artist Francis Bacon. Inspired by the late-artist’s distorted portraits, Murakami began questioning “how Bacon might have transformed a face…the methodology and the form of it” since he himself had also “been trying to do the same kind of transformation” with his anime-inspired characters.
Executed in 2018, Homage to Francis Bacon (Study for Head of George Dyer (On Light Ground)) is a flawless and phantasmagorical array of colours delivered in a digital-like perfection. Referencing Bacon’s 1964 studies of his lover and muse George Dyer, Murakami layers swirls of bright psychedelic colours enclosed within razor-fine contours in order to embody the visceral quality of the late-artist’s brushstrokes. Dyer is almost unrecognisable in this new Murakamified homage. His face, now proliferated with protruding anime eyes and sharp tentacles, looks towards a small Mr. DOB, who Murakami often refers to as his own alter ego. Thus, linking the artists together in a delirious and lustrous encapsulation of the Superflat aesthetic.
Murakami has always pushes the boundaries of creating largescale works with his love for finely crafted detail. Much like Warhol’s infamous workshop “The Silver Factory”, Murakami developed a studio system where he could “generate permutations of his stock characters using computer files, stencils, and later silk screens” (M. Darling, Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats its Own Leg, Chicago, 2017, p. 27). No longer constrained by limited manpower, Murakami is able to let his imagination run free and orchestrate paintings with great intricacy and grandeur. In this present work, more than fifty studio assistant names are handwritten by the artist himself on the reverse of the painting, thus revealing the intensive strategic planning and technical labour of each paint layer.
Ultimately, the crystallisation and metamorphosis of images buried in the dense mount of visual symbols reflects the psychedelic vibrancy of both Posi Mushrooms and Homage to Francis Bacon (Study for Head of George Dyer (On Light Ground)). Combining long-established traditions with contemporary mass-produced entertainment, Murakami continuously blurs the line between high and low art.
High and low, ancient and modern, oriental and occidental, contemporary Japanese artist Takashi Murakami moves freely within the ever-expanding field of art, commerce, and pop culture. Employing a distinctive “Superflat” style and ethos, which merges traditional Japanese painting techniques with the spirit of American Pop, anime, and otaku culture, Murakami goes “back into his catalogue of motifs and references, chew(s) them up, and spit(s) them back out in a newly reimagined form.” (M. Darling, Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats its Own Leg, Chicago, 2017, p.22). Both Posi Mushrooms and Homage to Francis Bacon (Study for Head of George Dyer (on light ground)) reveal this lineage of artistic influences melding into Murakami’s three-decade long exploration of painting.
Executed in 2002, Posi Mushrooms is an exquisite example of Murakami’s early engagement with the spore-laden fungus. Depicting a panoply of variegated fungi characters arranged neatly against a silver background, Murakami paints them with animated personalities. Sometimes sweet, sometimes menacing, these mushrooms are given big round eyes and cartoon eyelashes. Unlike Itō Jakuchū’s lateeighteenth century handscroll, which features a more naturalistic rendering of vegetables and insects, Murakami not only references the historical significance of mushrooms in Japanese visual culture, but also bodies forth a unique aesthetic of his own. As observed by Peter Daszak and Sara E. Howard, mushrooms “repeatedly (appear) in traditional Japanese art” and thus became a subject, or symbol, in which the contemporary and the historical collide (P. Daszak and S.E. Howard, ‘Fungal Foray’, Eco Health 9, 2012, p.103).
Often compared to Andy Warhol’s fixation of the “surface”, art critics understand Murakami’s “Superflat” to be a further elaboration into a particularly Japanese reality. It is an aesthetic predicated on the dissolution of Western distinctions such as high/low and art/ craft, which do not exist within “the horizontally organised nature of Japanese culture” (D. Hebdige, “Flat Boy vs. Skinny: Takashi Murakami and the Battle of ‘Japan’”,Murakami, Los Angeles, 2008, p.22). For Murakami, Posi Mushrooms is therefore a reimagination and expansion of traditional Japanese motifs within a contemporary commercial landscape, which ultimately probes further into the construction of culture.
Since 2004, Murakami began working on a series of works that paid homage to Irish-born British artist Francis Bacon. Inspired by the late-artist’s distorted portraits, Murakami began questioning “how Bacon might have transformed a face…the methodology and the form of it” since he himself had also “been trying to do the same kind of transformation” with his anime-inspired characters.
Executed in 2018, Homage to Francis Bacon (Study for Head of George Dyer (On Light Ground)) is a flawless and phantasmagorical array of colours delivered in a digital-like perfection. Referencing Bacon’s 1964 studies of his lover and muse George Dyer, Murakami layers swirls of bright psychedelic colours enclosed within razor-fine contours in order to embody the visceral quality of the late-artist’s brushstrokes. Dyer is almost unrecognisable in this new Murakamified homage. His face, now proliferated with protruding anime eyes and sharp tentacles, looks towards a small Mr. DOB, who Murakami often refers to as his own alter ego. Thus, linking the artists together in a delirious and lustrous encapsulation of the Superflat aesthetic.
Murakami has always pushes the boundaries of creating largescale works with his love for finely crafted detail. Much like Warhol’s infamous workshop “The Silver Factory”, Murakami developed a studio system where he could “generate permutations of his stock characters using computer files, stencils, and later silk screens” (M. Darling, Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats its Own Leg, Chicago, 2017, p. 27). No longer constrained by limited manpower, Murakami is able to let his imagination run free and orchestrate paintings with great intricacy and grandeur. In this present work, more than fifty studio assistant names are handwritten by the artist himself on the reverse of the painting, thus revealing the intensive strategic planning and technical labour of each paint layer.
Ultimately, the crystallisation and metamorphosis of images buried in the dense mount of visual symbols reflects the psychedelic vibrancy of both Posi Mushrooms and Homage to Francis Bacon (Study for Head of George Dyer (On Light Ground)). Combining long-established traditions with contemporary mass-produced entertainment, Murakami continuously blurs the line between high and low art.