Encompassing Murakami’s efforts as both a successful contemporary artist and a contributor to popular culture, “Untitled” of 2005 serves as a representative sample of the artist on the whole. The multicolored emblem of fashion brand Louis Vuitton is used as backdrop within image, displaying the twist to the iconic monogram that Murakami designed in 2002. The work uses the traditional style of Japanese art, a style that focuses on the surface of the work without much attention to depth or perspective, yet does so through a contemporary concern for aesthetics and popular culture.

Japanese artist Takashi Murakami (b. 1962) is irrefutably considered to be one of the most influential artists today, impacting both the fine art market and commercial industries globally through individual projects and collaboration efforts. Murakami received his BFA, MFA, and PhD from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, where he had originally planned to study animation but later chose to study traditional Japanese painting. Murakami has coined his own style as “superflat,” a technique that is both popular and persistent in Japanese art and is characterized through an emphasis on the surface and the use of flat planes of color. “Superflat” also speaks to Murakami’s larger artistic perspective and the concept of blending high and low culture and art, “flattening” or minimizing the existing division between fine art and the fashion and music industries. Murakami’s works have been exhibited in over fifty solo shows, recently including at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, NY (2008); Gagosian Gallery, New York, NY (2007); and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL (2007).

Selected Public Collections:
MOCA The Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA)
MFA Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA)
Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (Hiroshima, Japan)
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art (Kanazawa, Japan)