murakami ego booklet - english

©2012 ALRIWAQ1

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©2012 ALRIWAQ04

“Murakami―Ego” is the first exhibition in the Middle East by the internationally acclaimed Japanese artist, Takashi Murakami.

This presentation is one of the largest gatherings of the artist’s work to vdate including work created over the past 15 years. The installation has been conceived and choreographed by Murakami to function as a giant self-portrait―a look inside the artist’s mind manifested in a stunning variety of multi-media objects and environments.

The exhibition also brings together a number of important series within Murakami’s oeuvre which have never been fully assembled before, providing a rare opportunity to observe the full scope of the themes and methods which have defined his work.

Self-portrait Of The Distressed Artist, 2009Acrylic and platinum leaf on canvas mounted on aluminum frame1600 x 1600 x 50.8 mm Courtesy Galerie Perrotin, Paris ©2009 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.



This interior world conceived by Murakami takes advantageof the vast scale of the ALRIWAQ Exhibition Space and reveals the scope of Murakami’s physical and psychological universe.

For the exhibition, he has been able to realize his largest painted work to date. His four panel Arhat Painting stretches to one hundred meters long and wraps around three sides of the main gallery space. Conceived as a response to the recent natural disasters in Japan, the work draws on traditional historical painting to create a contemporary monument to the power of nature over Japanese life.


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Covered with the artist’s signature Eye pattern, the tent demonstrates the way in which Murakami uses the tools of mass entertainment to convey serious and art historically inspired content.

Over the past fifteen years, his work has expanded beyond small scale objects to include immersive environments, giant inflatable sculptures, and collaborations with designers and musicians which have brought to his work a new and larger audience.

Murakami has created an equally grand statement within the exhibition: a massive circus tent which serves as a theater for his recent animated films.


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This presentation also demonstrates the production methods Murakami has used to bring his creations to such a wide and diverse public. Sculptures like the Oval Buddha are installed on newly realized animated pedestals, while series like Pom & Me are presented in their entirety.

Seeing all the iterations of these works gives insight into the experiments in surface and materials that Murakami undertakes with each project. In much of his work, he follows in the footsteps of American pop artists like Andy Warhol in his use of serial production and chromatic variation between paintings. His development of his own signature flower pattern follows Warhol’s own series from the 1960s and Murakami’s Time Bokan paintings also are reminiscent of the American artist’s series of skull paintings.

Who’s Afraid Of Red, Yellow, Blue And Death, 2010 Acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame 3000 x 2344 x 50.8 mm Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York©2010 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

The key to Murakami’s embrace of serial production and industrial fabrication is the way in which he has looked towards both Western models like Warhol and strategies from Japanese pop-culture that deploy commercially conceived animated characters into the wider public consciousness.


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Murakami has of course created his own universe of iconic characters and the title of the exhibition, “Murakami―Ego”, evokes the sometimes overlooked personal dimension of this approach. The exhibition includes the entire case

The simplicity of these characters, derived as they are from Japanese Kawaii culture, is transcended by their journeys through vivid and often terrifying landscapes.

of characters from Murakami’s universe―figures like Mr. DOB, Kaikai and Kiki, Oval―dispersed across canvases and objects in a variety of shapes and sizes. These figures carry distinct individual personalities which evolve over disparate works.


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These humble figures are able to capture the range of emotional states and physical and psychological transformations of their maker.

A character like Mr. DOB, who appears in a 1997 inflatable sculpture as a slightly goofy floating head, can reappear in later works like the nightmarish 2002 canvases Tan Tan Bo Puking aka Gero Tan and Homage to Francis Bacon (Study of George Dyer),as an utterly different creature―grotesque, angry and terrifying.

The transformation of these figures also mirrors the shift in Murakami’s work from his early days as an artist struggling to make an impact on the Japanese art scene to his current reputation as an artist with one of the largest international profiles and whose signature style and imagery is instantly recognizable. These imaginative embodiments of Murakami’s subconscious have increasingly been accompanied by actual depictions of the artist’s body in both painting and sculpture. Murakami appears alongside Kaikai and Kiki, the split embodiments of his subconscious, in a series of brightly colored paintings.

In Me and Kaikai and Kiki, Kaikai,Kiki and Me―For Better or Worse, In good Times and Bad. The Weather is Fine, and Kaikai Kiki and Me―The Shocking Truth Revealed, Murakami appears as an irreverent cartoon cutout―flatly rendered and displaying only exaggerated emotional expressions. This approach to self-portraiture treats the artist as inseparable from the strategies of branding, marketing and production which he has applied to his other creations.



And Then, When That’s Done…… I Change. What I Was Yesterday Is Cast Aside, Like An Insect Shedding Its Skin, 2009 3000 x 3000 mm (2 panels)Courtesy Galerie Perrotin, Paris©2009 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.


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In his series of Pom & Me sculptures, Murakami appears with his dog as an oversized collectible action hero. Significantly, he is depicted not as an adult but a childlike embodiment of the type of manga culture which formed his artistic approach. These works seem to suggest that if the viewers want to understand Murakami the individual, then they must look at the cultural context around him and the diverse visual references which shaped his own aesthetic.

Pom & Me, 2009-2010 Carbon fiber, steel and corian base 1100 mm Courtesy Galerie Perrotin, Paris ©2009-2010 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.



Even The Digital Realm Has Flowers To Offer!, 2010Acrylic and gold leaf on canvas mounted on board 1500 x 50 mm diameterCourtesy Galerie Perrotin, Paris©2010 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.


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Release Chakra’s gate at this instant, 2008Acrylic and platinum leaf on canvas mounted on wood panel 160.1 x 351 x 5 cm (6 panels) Courtesy Blum & Poe, Los Angeles ©2008 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.



The monumental Self Portrait Balloon is one of the most striking new works in the exhibition and one which produces the sharpest break with Murakami’s familiar style.

This oversized inflatable sculpture is a shockingly realistic portrait of the artist. Situated at the entrance of the exhibition, it depicts the artist dressed in everyday clothes with the posture and gesture of a giant Buddha sculpture. This portrait demonstrates the equally powerful influence that Buddhist art and imagery has had over Murakami’s work.

For Murakami, Japan is a site where the imagery of popular culture and traditional religious iconography infuse and dominate visual culture and the artistic imagination. His work regularly references the legends and stylistic codes of religious work. It also tracks the way images transform from spiritual icons to secular images that can be commercialized and appropriated for a variety of purposes.

His series of Daruma paintings reference a grotesque popular legend about the monk who brought Zen Buddhism from India to China and whose image has been adopted for secular good luck charms. Similarly, his giant self-portrait is an embodiment of the manner in which Buddhist thought has shaped his own self-conception as an artist.


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If visitors approach “Murakami―Ego” as a self-portrait of the artist, then they also must treat the exhibition as a self-portrait of contemporary Japan. Murakami has consistently emphasized how his work, in its imagery and its methods, are inseparable from the history and culture of Japan over the past fifty years. The psychological trauma of World War II and the problematically symbiotic relationship with America have suffused all parts of contemporary Japanese life.

Murakami is an avowed critic of this history, but he has admittedly been fully formed by these social and political circumstances. His iconography and formal approach borrow freely from the intersection between Japan and the West and he feels that his personal style is a direct and honest reflection of this hybrid visual culture. In its scale and complexity, “Murakami―Ego” is perhaps the most revealing look at the artist and his role as a cipher of the global unconscious.


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murakami ego booklet - english

Documents

production methods murakami

artists work

largest painted work

alriwaq exhibition space

artists mind

small scale objects

acclaimed japanese artist

scope of murakamis physical