Art Basel in Hong Kong brought a lot of artists to the city, including Takashi Murakami who is looking forward to a retrospective of his work in Moscow this Fall. He spoke to Enid Tsui about his reputation:Continue Reading
Murakami’s Miss Ko2 Tests Market at Sotheby’s HK
One of Amy Cappellazzo’s early successes in the auction business was when she sold in May of 2003 an edition of Takashi Murakami’s Miss Ko2 for the then un-heard-of price of $567,500. Seven years later, another example of the work was sold by Philippe Ségalot at his Carte Blanche sale at Phillips for a whopping $6.8m, a nearly 12-fold increase in price.
On April 2, Sotheby’s will bring another example from the edition of 3 to market in Hong Kong with an estimate of HK$15-20m ($1.9-2.6m.) The work achieved Murakami’s second highest price when it sold at Phillips. The estimate may be an indication of a re-calibrated Murakami market. But it might also be a red flag to collectors for one of the artist’s most recognizable and exhibited pieces.
Murakami Brought Marciano Back to Collecting
If this New York Times story on the Marciano Brothers’ private museum is to be believed, the jeans magnates got back into art collecting in relative hurray amassing a trove of a thousand or so art works, the bulk of which seem to have been bought in five years since the Murakami show in Los Angeles which sparked something within the brothers:
Maurice and Paul began collecting art around 1990. They started with Impressionist pieces but soon moved to the contemporary art market and sold the older works.
“If we had collected only Impressionists, today we would have only a few pieces, instead of hundreds of pieces,” Maurice Marciano said.
[…] Paul Schimmel, the vice president of the Hauser & Wirth gallery here and the former chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, said Maurice Marciano’s interest in art was revived when he toured a Takashi Murakami show at the museum in 2008.Continue Reading
Christie’s New Day Sale = $8.8m
Lost in Japan
Linda Yablonsky got trapped in Tokyo when Takashi Murakami’s Geisai #15 was cancelled due to the tsunami. Putting her time to good use, she spent some time with Murakami and discovered that along with the large staff of painters, his work is all about the artists:
In one of the two exhibition spaces, works from his private collection by Mark Grotjahn, Yoshitomo Nara, and Grayson Perry were on show with three new nudes-on-silver by Murakami—his Three Graces, as it were—that will head to London at the end of May for a show at Gagosian. (Murakami has caught the collecting bug pretty badly, especially for Nara.) […] Based on paintings by the nineteenth-century artist Kuroda Seiki, one of the first Japanese to incorporate Western imagery in his work, the new Murakami works represent something of a departure from his Mr. Pointys, mushroom-cloud skulls, and flowering smiley faces. There were also a couple of modest, impressionistic paintings of a big-eyed young girl by OB, a shy nineteen-year-old from Kyoto who was in the gallery to meet us. She is one of fifteen young artists currently resident in a mentoring program that Murakami, an industry unto himself, has established in his suburban factory.
On a tatami-matted platform in the other room, three of his flowerball sculptures, in three different sizes, were paired with three figures of cute adolescent girls by Chiho Aoshima, one of the seven artists whose careers the Kaikai Kiki organization manages. […] I asked about a sixteen-foot-tall Mr. Pointy canvas taking shape in the studio. Barnett Newman’s “zips” inspired it, he said, naming Donald Judd, Julian Opie, and Brice Marden’s monochromes as other sources, and On Kawara, Tatsuo Miyajima, and Yasumasa Morimura as the artists who paved the way for Murakami to be “super famous.”
Tokyo Story (ArtForum)
