Takashi Murakami

Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Los Angeles, Royal/T, Just Love Me, 2008
Los Angeles, Royal/T, I Can't Feel My Face, 2009
Los Angeles, Royal/T, The Warholian, 2010-2011

Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals on minute and unobtrusive rub mark towards the top right corner. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light. Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is lighter and more vibrant in the original, and fails to convey the metallic quality of the paint.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Rooted within the Japanese art form of Byōbu, the traditional craft of highly lacquered decorative screen painting, the high sheen of Takashi Murakami's immaculately painted Soutatsu classically evokes the Momoyama and Edo periods from the late-Sixteenth to the mid-Nineteenth Centuries. In line with other works from Murakami's oeuvre the present work stands as a self-conscious integration of the pre-modern era of Japanese arts and crafts.  In its incorporation of metallic leaf as a decorative ground for a profusion of painted flowers and cartoon mushrooms, the present work is directly related to such examples as the famous early nineteenth-century screen by Kôrin Ogata. Echoing the repetition of Ogata's painted iris motif composed against a ground of gold leaf across several highly lacquered panels, Murakami's integration of an expertly applied and flawless silver ground substantiates the fundamentally classical arts and crafts aspect of the artist’s 'Superflat' manifesto.

In forging an aesthetic grounded in the special effects of animé and manga, Murakami presents a vision of the culturally dislocated Japanese generation nurtured by the political custody of the United States after World War II. Exposed to the American capitalist model, the resulting economic prosperity has recently been considered to have cultured a 'limited freedom' of post-war Japanese democracy. In turn this fostered a restricted and impoverished culture lacking in any self-reflective tradition or spiritual depth - the ultimate embodiment of which is the indigenous comic book sub-culture of otaku. Emblematically present within the excessive almost fetishistic detail and two-dimensional childlike appeal of Murakami's floral composition is the very quintessence of the artist's response to such cultural conditions, conceptually unified under the umbrella term 'Superflat'.

It is here that the notion of the 'screen' takes on a richly multivalent cultural significance. Within this surfeit of ostensible cultural misnomers redolent within the sheer painted perfection of Soutatsu, Murakami ingeniously scrambles, disintegrates and compresses conventional visual codes into the singular cogent stratum of highly polished, flawless, screen-like computer graphic surface of his magnificently hand-crafted works.