TAKASHI MURAKAMI | MPGMP

signed in English and dated 11 on the reverse

Private Collection
Poly International Auction Co., Ltd., Beijing, 4 June 2016, Lot 6853
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner 

Paris, Galerie Perrotin, Takashi Murakami: Homage to Yves Klein, October 2011 - January 2012
Seoul, PLATEAU, Takashi in Superflat Wonderland, July - December 2013, p. 76 and p. 132

Kwon Mee-yoo, "Nerds and Greeks Come Out to Play: Murakami's Pop Art Exhibition a Tribute to Japan's Quirky 'Otaku' Culture", The Korea Times, 8 July 2013, illustrated in colour

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


Presenting a sensory psychedelic deluge of intricately rendered stylised skulls, MPGMP represents a consummate expression of Takashi Murakami’s artistic enterprise executed in line with his meticulously exacting standards. Flawlessly rendered with a lavishly embossed finish, each of the densely layered skulls were painted by hand with immaculate precision to deliver digital-like perfection. Dominated by a rich array of crimson and fuchsia hues, and punctuated throughout with a glowing mixture of spectral shades and neon highlights, the present work is an immediately impactful and visually iconic paradigm of the historically multi-layered yet fetishistically flat production of Murakami.

One of the most acclaimed postwar Asian artists to have reached superstar status in the international art world, Murakami is celebrated for his era-defining oeuvre that merged contemporary pop culture with fine art. First introducing his revolutionary 'Superflat' philosophy in the 1990s, Murakami’s works draw on everything from anime and manga to Buddhist forms and iconography to Pop and Abstract Expressionism, while his highly organized production methods fused art and commercial enterprise in a way that took Andy Warhol’s vision to a new level. While trained in the Japanese art of Nihonga, a highly regimented and traditional form of art, Murakami’s wholly unique and contemporary aesthetic moves seamlessly amongst diverse roles as artist, producer, theorist, curator, designer, businessman and celebrity, rendering him an unprecedented phenomenon in the global cultural scene. With his numerous collaborations with luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton, Murakami’s hybridized art not only put Japanese pop culture onto the global map of contemporary art but uses it to reference and embody the overwhelming phenomenon of cultural collisions occurring all over the world.

MPGMP epitomizes the full depth and complexity of Murakami’s extraordinarily multifaceted corpus, evoking a myriad of symbolic associations. Murakami’s fixation on skulls immediately evoke the vanitas – a genre of still-lifes that emerged in 16th and 17th century Holland that illustrate the transience of life and the certainty of death. However, by rendering them in bright Neo-pop colours, Murakami both engages with and subverts the genre with his highly decorative plastic style. From afar, the painting may seem to viewers on first glance like a bed of wild flowers, drawing parallels to Murakami’s other works in analogous series that feature all-over compositions of trademark smiling flowers, whilst also evoking metaphors for the ephemeral fragility of life. The present work also invites associations with Andy Warhol’s Skulls (1976); Warhol’s painting likewise employs bright vivid colours in its depiction of macabre subject matter – a strategy that conflates the notions of beauty and death.

Created in 2011, MPGMP was painted during a period in which Murakami was highly preoccupied with themes of death and accordingly broke new ground in his visual vocabulary. Shaken by the earthquake and tsunami in the same year, the artist’s exhibitions during ensuring years, such as In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow (2015), expanded on dark themes that have all along been underneath the surface of his colourful pop art, whilst also expanding on themes related to Zen Buddhism, emptiness, unity and infinity. Works from this period are significant because they constitute something of a personal epiphany for Murakami, developed from ongoing spiritual practice. MPGMP in particular evokes the Buddhist concept Shogyo mujo, which alludes to the transience of life; as Murakami explains: “The expression Shogyo mujo is very important in Japanese culture, but no one genuinely understands it. After these disasters, people finally understood it in all its brutality” (Takashi Murakami quoted in Massimiliano Gioni, "Takashi Murakami: SUPERFLAT TO SUPERNATURAL", Flash Art International, 45, no. 284, May 2012, p. 52-56).

Entrenched in the ancient Eastern practice of decorative painting on traditional lacquered panels, Murakami engenders a new expression for Japanese high-art that encompasses the mythology, craft and skill of Japan’s past with the pervasive commercial visual culture that developed in Japan following the Second World War. Combining complex spiritual and traditional themes with social commentary as well as his trademark maverick and mischievous sense of humour, MPGMP reveals the superstar artist at the height of his powers whilst also revealing the artist’s profound empathy for humankind. In the artist’s own words: After the earthquake and tsunami natural disasters, I realized that people – in order to get away from such realities – do need religion and stories. So with that in mind, I am now creating stories and characters for pieces” (the artist quoted in “Interview: Takashi Murakami Discusses His New Death-Themed Art Exhibition and His Film Trilogy “Jellyfish Eyes””, complex.com, 12 November 2014). In the last decade, Murakami has become a global cultural phenomenon with important showings across the world. Most recently, the artist was subject of a large-scale survey at Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong, where his iconic skull motif took over massive spaces of the art gallery to offer audiences unique immersive displays. As an early example of Murakami’s singular and highly representative skull paintings, MPGMP is a superlative archetype of the artist’s ubiquitous oeuvre.