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Lot Essay
A mosaic of beaming flowers fills Takashi Murakami’s dizzying Thinking Matter (Red). Painted in 2016, and acquired by the present owner that year, the work exudes joy and delight. Using a palette of pink and cherry red, Murakami’s dense arrangement bursts from the round canvas. The twinkling flowers seem a riotous medley of jubilation. Beyond its grinning surface, however, Thinking Matter (Red) is replete with associations. The flowers themselves exemplify the idea of kawaii, the Japanese culture of cuteness, while simultaneously nodding towards the Edo period’s Rinpa School, whereby artists represented flora and fauna in highly decorative and patterned imagery. The circular form of the painting itself plays on the Renaissance tondo, but the vertiginous, twinkling flowers offer no perspectival depth, instead collapsing all notions of space and gravity.
Murakami’s oeuvre is broadly united under the notion of the ‘Superflat’, a term he coined to refer, in part, to the almost depthless surfaces that he creates. Flattening is conceptually and physically embedded in Japan’s history, most overtly through the invasion of Western culture: Murakami’s Superflat represents a merge of traditional Japanese painting aesthetics with the flat screens of digital imagery, via the very real and horrifying topographical flattening of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Superflat is manifested in his production methods, vivid colours, and crisp lines—a fitting blend of American Pop and Japanese decorative arts. Indeed, the artist’s representation of flowers perfectly encapsulates this fusion, recalling both the Rinpa School as well as the long history of floral studies in western art and Andy Warhol’s seminal Flowers of 1964.
For Murakami, flowers are an enduring fascination which he first began obsessively sketching while preparing for the entrance exams at Tokyo’s National University of Fine Arts. After graduation, he spent almost a decade working at a preparatory school where he taught his students to draw flowers. ‘At the beginning,’ he remembers, ‘to be frank, I didn’t like flowers, but as I continued teaching in the school, my feelings changed: their smell, their shape—it all made me feel almost physically sick, and at the same time I found them very “cute.” Each one seemed to have its own feelings, its own personality ... And these days, now that I draw flowers rather frequently, that sensation has come back very vividly. I find them just as pretty, just as disturbing. At the same time there is this strength in them; it is the same image of strength I find when drawing the human face. So I thought that if the opportunity arose, I would pretty much like to make a work in which I would represent them as if in a “crowd scene,” in the manner of these scenes of moving crowds that you see in films’ (T. Murakami, quoted in Takashi Murakami Kaikai Kiki, exh. cat. Fondation Cartier/Serpentine Gallery, Paris and London 2002, p. 84). This intensity abounds in Thinking Matter (Red), which manifests the Superflat aesthetic in brilliant colour. Filtering art-historical motifs through the contemporary lenses of anime, manga and the digital sphere, Murakami has created a world as entrancing as Alice’s Wonderland; vibrant and mesmeric, Thinking Matter (Red) offers a vision of delirious joy.
Murakami’s oeuvre is broadly united under the notion of the ‘Superflat’, a term he coined to refer, in part, to the almost depthless surfaces that he creates. Flattening is conceptually and physically embedded in Japan’s history, most overtly through the invasion of Western culture: Murakami’s Superflat represents a merge of traditional Japanese painting aesthetics with the flat screens of digital imagery, via the very real and horrifying topographical flattening of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Superflat is manifested in his production methods, vivid colours, and crisp lines—a fitting blend of American Pop and Japanese decorative arts. Indeed, the artist’s representation of flowers perfectly encapsulates this fusion, recalling both the Rinpa School as well as the long history of floral studies in western art and Andy Warhol’s seminal Flowers of 1964.
For Murakami, flowers are an enduring fascination which he first began obsessively sketching while preparing for the entrance exams at Tokyo’s National University of Fine Arts. After graduation, he spent almost a decade working at a preparatory school where he taught his students to draw flowers. ‘At the beginning,’ he remembers, ‘to be frank, I didn’t like flowers, but as I continued teaching in the school, my feelings changed: their smell, their shape—it all made me feel almost physically sick, and at the same time I found them very “cute.” Each one seemed to have its own feelings, its own personality ... And these days, now that I draw flowers rather frequently, that sensation has come back very vividly. I find them just as pretty, just as disturbing. At the same time there is this strength in them; it is the same image of strength I find when drawing the human face. So I thought that if the opportunity arose, I would pretty much like to make a work in which I would represent them as if in a “crowd scene,” in the manner of these scenes of moving crowds that you see in films’ (T. Murakami, quoted in Takashi Murakami Kaikai Kiki, exh. cat. Fondation Cartier/Serpentine Gallery, Paris and London 2002, p. 84). This intensity abounds in Thinking Matter (Red), which manifests the Superflat aesthetic in brilliant colour. Filtering art-historical motifs through the contemporary lenses of anime, manga and the digital sphere, Murakami has created a world as entrancing as Alice’s Wonderland; vibrant and mesmeric, Thinking Matter (Red) offers a vision of delirious joy.