Takashi Murakami

Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris
Acquired by the present owner from the above

This work is in excellent condition. It is slightly dusty overall. There is very slight wear to the lower left corner tip. Under ultraviolet light there are no apparent restorations. This painting is unframed.
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Internationally celebrated and globally renowned, Takashi Murakami is widely acclaimed for orchestrating an artistic empire descended from the Warholian art-business model. In the artist’s Factory-like studio workshop, each work is executed in line with his exacting standards. Blue Skull Painting, 2012, exhibits the artist’s characteristic meticulous style; each of the densely layered skulls were painted by hand with faultless and immaculate precision to deliver computer screen-like perfection. Dominated by a rich array of blue hues, and punctuated throughout with a glowing mixture of spectral shades and neon highlights, the present work is an immediately impactful and visually stunning paradigm of the historically multilayered yet fetishistically flat production of  Murakami.

From seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas paintings to Andy Warhol’s famed 1976 series of silkscreened Skulls and Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God,  art history has seen artists engage repeatedly with the theme of inevitable human mortality. Though it nods to this grand thematic tradition, Blue Skull Painting is essential Murakami, whose oeuvre is defined by a complex negotiation between the mass-market, the contemporary art market, Japanese tradition and popular culture.  His practice invokes a pluralistic artistic fusion disquietingly underscored by the profound impairment of Japanese culture in the aftermath of the Second World War. The literal and metaphoric ‘flattening’ of Japanese culture - heralded by the Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and stymied by the dominance of American and Western surveillance and influence thereafter - is confronted by Murakami with an oeuvre idiosyncratically united by the term, Superflat. Blue Skull Painting presents a flawless synthesis of the artist’s Superflat aesthetic and socio-culturally charged conceptual project.

By repeating the skull subject as a powerful symbol of death Murakami both magnifies and desensitizes our fear of mortality. Similarly, this motif at once represents both everybody and nobody: devoid of the vital coordinates of facial individuality - hair, eye and skin color; length of nose; prominence of brow; undulations of cheeks - the skull possesses an uncompromising universality. In addition, by rendering his skulls in vivacious hues of acrylic paint the artist creates a stark, satirical contrast with the morbid and somber subject matter. The coloristic optimism and vitality only serves to underline the transience of life pitted against the omnipotence of death. In Blue Skull Painting even death, the final adversary of Humankind, becomes mere lurid mundanity when perceived through the contemporary agency of repetition and Murakami’s signature aesthetic profile. The artist’s impeccably rendered skulls are here invested with the synthetic flawlessness of the television screen and computer graphics. Having forged a distinctive artistic voice grounded in the special effects of animé and manga, a visual sub-culture that reactively emerged following the proliferation of Americana in Japan, Murakami presents a fine-art lexicon for the culturally dislocated Japanese generation nurtured by the US political custody in the second half of the Twentieth Century.