Lot 481
  • 481

TAKASHI MURAKAMI | Red Life Force

Estimate
800,000 - 1,200,000 USD
Log in to view results
bidding is closed

Description

  • Takashi Murakami
  • Red Life Force
  • signed and dated 2012 on the overlap
  • acrylic on canvas
  • 118 1/4 by 92 1/4 in. 300.4 by 234.3 cm.

Provenance

Gagosian Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner  

Exhibited

Hong Kong, Gagosian Gallery, Takashi Murakami: Flowers & Skulls, November 2012 - February 2013, pp. 42-45, illustrated in color 

Condition

Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at +1 212 606 7254 for a copy of the report prepared by Modern Art Conservation.
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.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Catalogue Note

Art world superstar Takashi Murakami is widely acclaimed for orchestrating an artistic empire descended from the Warholian art-business model. Each work in his Factory-like studio is executed in line with his exacting standards. Red Life Force is meticulously rendered in the artist’s characteristic style: each of the densely layered skulls are hand painted with immaculate precision to deliver a sense of digital-like perfection. Dominated by a rich array of red hues and punctuated with a glowing mixture of spectral shades and neon highlights, the present work is an immediately impactful and a visually stunning paradigm of the multilayered yet obsessively flat production of Takashi Murakami. The colorful, tightly layered skulls construct a macabre millefiori, evoking the theme of mortality that has been explored throughout the art historical canon, from seventeenth century Dutch vanitas paintings to Andy Warhol’s famed 1976 series of silkscreened Skulls. Though the work alludes to such grand thematic tradition, Red Life Force is quintessential Murakami, whose oeuvre is the embodiment of cultural collisions effected by the globalization of the mass-market and contemporary art market. Trained in the traditional Japanese art movement of Nihonga, the artist has also found inspiration in everything from manga and anime to Buddhist forms and iconography. His practice invokes an artistic plurality disconcertingly underscored by the profound impairment of Japanese culture in the aftermath of the Second World War. Murakami confronts the literal and metaphoric “flattening” of Japanese culture—heralded by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and exacerbated by the dominance of Western surveillance and influence thereafter—in his oeuvre, united by the term Superflat. Red Life Force presents a flawless synthesis of the artist’s Superflat series and socio-culturally charged conceptual interests.

Following the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan the year before the present work was executed, Murakami turned frequently to studies of mortality and human empathy in his work. Through the repetition of the skull as a powerful symbol of death, Murakami both magnifies and desensitizes our fear of death. Similarly, the motif simultaneously represents both everyone and no one: the skull becomes uncompromisingly universal in its lack of individuality, devoid of hair, eyes, nose, flesh, life. The vivacious hues of acrylic paint are in stark, satirical contrast with the morbid subject matter. The kaleidoscopic vitality, combined with the work’s deceptive title—it promises blood and life but presents only a colorful death—underlines the transience of life pitted against the omnipotence of death. In Red Life Force even death, the final adversary of humankind, is reduced to lurid mundanity through the contemporary practice of visual repetition and Murakami’s signature aesthetic. The artist’s exquisitely rendered skulls are here invested with the unnatural, synthetic perfection of the digital age. Having forged a distinctive artistic voice grounded in the special effects of anime 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.