Curated by Katya Inozemtseva

Fresh on the heels of his retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Takashi Murakami is set to conquer Moscow. The first major solo exhibition of the Japanese artist’s work in Russia, the show includes a broad selection of works made between the early 1990s and the present, and focuses specifically on Murakami’s singularly gleeful, Pop-centric engagement with the culture of his home country. The show’s first section situates Murakami within the tradition of Japanese art history, while the second revisits “Little Boy”—the controversial  exhibition he curated in 2005 for the Japan Society in New York. The third section explores the aesthetic of kawaii—a driving force behind the globalization of Japan’s “cute” culture—and the fourth reconstructs a part of the artist’s large-scale “factory.” Lastly, Murakami emphasizes his decades-long interest in his art’s commercial valences, presenting a profusion of his playful patterns on the museum’s café and bookshop walls.

— Hiroko Ikegami