Murakami at Gagosian

Half an hour before the opening of Takashi Murakami’s show at Gagosian Beverly Hills, the line of people waiting in the rain extended for an entire block. The Japanese artist has the standing of a pop celebrity. His exhibition GYATEI², on view to April 13, has most of the identifiable features that support such mass affection. For decades, he has done simple, brightly colored paintings of the chrysanthemum blossom, a motif of traditional Japanese art updated for contemporary viewers.

There are plenty of those sorts of paintings in the show, all recent, as well as a huge, gold-leafed, flower-headed figure holding the hand of a flower-headed child: Parent and Child (2018).

Murakami is a pioneer artist of the digital age, one of the first to successfully combine Western Pop art, Japanese anime and internet marketing strategies. He formed his Kaikai Kiki company to offer his art at the affordable level of a gift shop and as well as the rarified level of a seven-figure investment.

In addition to familiar flower faces, in this show there is the return of the manga-inspired Tan Tan Bo. One of the most spectacular paintings has a spectacular title: Tan Tan Bo a.k.a Gerotan: Having vomited five viscera and six bowels along with a lump of ego, he swallows them back into his empty stomach as everything disperses into the void; along the process he starts his journey into meditation (2018).

Other paintings have thought bubbles in tiny print with the artist’s musings about his own state of being and the foolishness of internet relationships. In Viral: And Yet the Earth Moves (2019), he apologizes to a future 50 years hence for wasting time on Instagram.