Artist plays mind games with viewers
Takashi Murakami's incredibly detailed and wacky paintings are the doors to his imagination, writes Kavita Daswani
Dominating one of the spacious white-walled galleries at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles is a towering, glittering, gold sculpture: swirling flames emanate from a vast skull, the cavernous eye sockets occupied by smaller skulls, the whole effect like that of a gilded alien cadaver in a hurricane.
This is the world distilled through the mind of Takashi Murakami, the 51-year-old Japanese artist whose works sell for tens of millions of dollars, and who is among Japan's most acclaimed modern artists. A fan of manga, he has woven brightly coloured and often bizarre graphics into his trademark aesthetic, producing sculptures and paintings of stunning depth and range. He sits at the crossroads of a multitude of visual art forms, from sculptures to paintings, fashion, film and installations: his take on them is always striking, colourful, exuberant, startling and versatile.
All those elements are certainly in evidence at Blum & Poe, which has previously opened its halls to exhibitions by the Shanghai/New York-based Zhang Huan and the Berlin-based Matt Saunders.
Murakami's "Arhat", which runs until May 25, is his sixth solo exhibition with Blum & Poe, and his first significant showing in the US since a travelling event some years ago. (He's not been idle: in the past few years, his works have gone from the Gagosian in London and Rome to the Palace of Versailles in France, to the ARKI gallery in Taipei, and the Guggenheim in Bilbao.)
That is the challenge from Murakami, who only seems to ask his audience to feel something - astonishment, fear, contemplation … His work begs to be stared at, rather than cursorily taken in
Murakami created new works for "Arhat", a Sanskrit word that translates as "a being who has achieved a state of enlightenment". It's understandable - initially anyway - to be oblivious to the connection between an elevated spiritual state and some of the hard-edged, almost sinister elements in the artworks presented here.