Murakami e Abloh they created an artistic, media and production collaboration with layered paintings, large sculptures and the merging of their respective brands and trademarks. Figures that push against the parameters of fashion, art and popular culture, provocatively crossing the lines between them.
In his work, Murakami draws on sources as diverse as classical Japanese painting, the otaku subculture, Western art theory, Hollywood cinema, and hip-hop. His artistic production poured into fashion, cinema and commercial goods, both luxurious and cheap, avoiding divisions between high art and popular culture.
Abloh however, as an architect and engineer, works on fashion, architecture, performance and consumer products, often deconstructing the creative process in public to challenge and analyze existing aesthetic systems and their distribution. His brand of street-fashion off-White, which he founded in 2013, combines conventional tailoring with more subversive references, while his role as artistic director of menswear of Louis Vuitton places his current design work in dialogue with Murakami's celebrated collaborations with Vuitton, starting in 2002.
For "AMERICAN TOO” Murakami and Abloh have produced works in which their respective styles and brands intersect in a flow of mash-up from punk freewheeling. The two artists, kindred spirits from different sectors of a wider cultural area, reflect incisively on the signs of the current times as they work to disrupt the stratifications of cultural production.
A series of new paintings borrow motifs from Murakami and Abloh's individual work stories and combine them with art historical imagery. Signature arrows of Abloh's Off-White label are overlaid with Murakami's iconic rainbow flower, color-graded canvas and images of Mr. DOB, the whimsical character who became Murakami's first character-inspired signature creation of anime and manga.
Bernini's Self-Portrait as a Young Man (1623) dissolves into a vortex of psychedelic colors, in which the traces of Mr. DOB transform the youthful silhouette of the Baroque artist. A series of sculptures composed of each artist's trademark becomes oversized, lucid and almost menacingly optimistic. They repeat the human-scale plastic iterations of the flower and the arrows, this time in three-dimensional medium.
Takashi Murakami was born in 1962 in Tokyo, where he lives and works. Collections include the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. Recent institutional exhibitions include Murakami Versailles, Château de Versailles, France (2010); Murakami: 500 Arhats, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2015); Murakami by Murakami, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2017); The Deep End of the Universe, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Under Radiation Falls, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2017); Octopus eats its leg, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2017, visited Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada, and Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX, in 2018). Murakami is the founder of Kaikai Kiki Co. Ltd., an art production and art management company, which both produces his work and functions as a supportive environment for emerging artists.
Virgil Abloh was born in 1980 in Rockford, Illinois. After earning a bachelor's degree in civil engineering, he completed a master's degree in architecture. In 2013, he founded the Milan-based Off-White clothing line, for which he received the British Fashion Council's Urban Luxe award in 2017. In March, Louis Vuitton named Abloh as its new menswear artistic director. He showed his first collection for Louis Vuitton during Paris Men's Fashion Week in June 2018. In 2019, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago will hold a retrospective of his work, curated by Michael Darling.
Source: Gagosian
