Takashi Murakami channels his love for NFTs into a new series of pixelated portraits and anime avatars. See them here

At the end of the 1980s, Mike Kelley unstable audiences from Chicago to Los Angeles with his provocative site-specific work Pay for your pleasure. Kelley led visitors through a colorful hallway of 42 cultural icons each affixed with a quote celebrating the rebellion. The work mocked society’s assumptions that artists were pure, their work liberating.

For his new exhibition at Gagosian, Takashi Murakami openly draws inspiration from Kelley’s work, trading designs for business figures and poster aesthetics for pixelated CGI. On a technicolor timeline, we meet Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, and Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin.

The images started out as pixel portraits for Murakami’s OpenSea account, but now with the attached quotes it’s hard to tell the meaning, especially given Murakami’s current market dominance and involvement with NFTs. .

Installation view of “Understanding the New Cognitive Domain”, 2023. Photo: Thomas Lannes, courtesy Gagosian.

“Understanding the New Cognitive Domain,” which is on display at Gagosian’s Le Bourget on the outskirts of Paris, duly showcases some of Murakami’s blockchain-related ventures, even as his large-scale paintings dominate the gallery. The most publicized is “Flower Jet Coin NFTa pixelated version of Murakami’s classic smiley flower, minted and offered free to visitors on the show’s opening day.

“I think NFTs can be a sign for people to come into my world and feel closer to my art,” Murakami told Artnet News, noting that he had done something similar with miniature sculptures in gumball machines. “For me, it’s really important for people to experience my view of the world, and not just through my paintings and sculptures. I need different forms for people to experience my work.

View of Murakami’s NFT Paintings Gallery. Photo: Thomas Lannes, courtesy Gagosian.

The Tokyo-based artist also showcases his inversions: physical versions of works he originally created digitally as NFTs. Murakami entered the NFT market a few weeks after the $69 million Beeple sale at Christie’s, though the artist also credits the influence of seeing his children enter the world of the Metaverse through play.

Its super flat aesthetic and cute characters have been a hit with the web3 crowd. Among its most popular drops were 2021’s Clone X NFTs, a collection of 20,000 algorithmically generated characters designed for the Metaverse. AT Le BourgetMurakami features two of the anime-esque avatars in offline works on mirror plates.

Despite these incursions in progress in the realm of NFTs, most of the show rests firmly on long-established ground – in one case literally with Dragon in the Clouds – Indigo Blue, a 12-foot-long work from 2010. Crush the Indigo Dragon is a new work based on the stage curtain Murakami created for Tokyo’s main Kabuki theater. Commissioned by director Takashi Miike, the 75-foot-long acrylic on canvas is something of a celebration of the giants of the Japanese art, film and theater worlds.

Takashi Murakami, Dragon in the Clouds – Indigo Blue (2010). Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano, courtesy Gagosian.

There’s something all about Murakami’s latest Gagosian show (or should we call it a drop) and it fits an artist who sees the worlds of crypto, NFTs and art merging.

“One of the goals of NFT art is really to expand the cognitive dimensions of value,” Murakami said. “To question the concept of value and what it is. It is to understand the new cognitive domain.

See more images from Murakami’s performance below.

Takashi Murakami, The succession of the name of Ichikawa Danjūrō XIII, Hakuen, Kabuki Jūhachiban (detail) (2023). Photo: Thomas Lannes, courtesy Gagosian.