Curated by Hervé Chandès and Hélène Kelmachter
If Manet and all those Impressionists loved Japanese prints for their weightless, shadowless world of elegant line and pure color and collected the exotic bric-a-brac of fans, screens, and kimonos, what would they have made of Takashi Murakami? As with Mariko Mori’s tableaux, his superflat comic faces, magic mushrooms, decal flowers, and lanternlike balloons are rooted in Japan’s vast Pop universe, with inspiration coming from trashy magazines and coloring books. This show of mainly new work, curated by Hervé Chandès and Hélène Kelmachter, expands Murakami’s franchise, which is now moving into fashion, film, music, and cartoons. Here’s a fresh version of Japonisme for the twenty-first century.
