Takashi Murakami

The Cleveland Museum of Art looks forward to welcoming visitors to Takashi Murakami: Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow this May. Originating at the Broad in Los Angeles, this exhibition is reimagined in an expanded form for the CMA. 

Having emerged in the 1990s, Takashi Murakami (Japanese, born 1962) has become one of the most popular artists working today through his dynamic integration of fine and commercial art. He is known for his pantheon of vividly colorful characters inspired by Japanese anime and manga, as well as his creation of the Superflat artistic movement, which refers to flattened forms found across many historical eras in Japanese art against the backdrop of Japan and the United States’s interconnected economies after World War II. In addition to his own art practice, Murakami has participated in numerous collaborative projects with artists, designers, and brands, including Virgil Abloh, Louis Vuitton, and Pharrell Williams.

Occupying the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Hall and Gallery as well as other locations throughout the CMA, Takashi Murakami is filled with paintings and sculptures that pulsate with color, sheen, and vibrant energy. At stake, however, is darker content, for Murakami created the works in this exhibition in response to three historical crises: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States in 1945 during World War II; the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, which also caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident; and the COVID-19 pandemic, which began in 2019. The works on view consider the impact of trauma on individuals, manifested not only through grief but also through an outpouring of creativity, religious fervor, and obsession with a parallel universe found in the digital realm. As Murakami explains, “I believe we artists are . . . in the position to provide salvation for the mind and heart.”1

Murakami’s work also has connections to historical Japanese art and architecture, which he mines to support his contemporary vision. This is vivid in the Ames Family Atrium, where Murakami creates a site-specific re-creation of the Yumedono—or Hall of Dreams—from the Horyuji Temple complex in Nara. This impressive octagonal building is a monument to Shōtoku Taishi, a central figure in Japanese history, religion, and culture. In Nara, Yumedono houses the Kuse Kannon, a statue honoring Shōtoku, which is believed to have the power to save people from suffering. In Cleveland, visitors are able to enter Murakami’s rendering of Yumedono to experience four new paintings by the artist that the structure was designed to house. 

Another spectacular work that draws on art history and is featured in this exhibition is Murakami’s 100 Arhats (2013). This monumental painting, measuring more than 9 by 32 feet, is inspired by the ubiquitous representation of arhats—or Buddhist saints—in historical Asian art. In his painting, Murakami reimagines the themes, narratives, and characters that have driven this pictorial tradition, creating a new visual world that is a compelling reflection on the present. Takashi Murakami illuminates the power of contemporary art to help us interpret the world we inhabit as it reflects on the history that precedes our moment in time.