Murakami & Abloh

We want to see the newest things. That is because we want to see the future, even if only momentarily. It is the moment in which, even if we don’t completely understand what we have glimpsed, we are nonetheless touched by it. This is what we have come to call art.
—Takashi Murakami

We are driven by an innate ambition to make artworks that are shaped by societal observations—in a variety of media—which by their existence produce a new cultural impact.
—Virgil Abloh

Gagosian is pleased to present new collaborative works by Takashi Murakami and Virgil Abloh, following their first exhibition, future history, at Gagosian London.

During their recent collaboration, Murakami and Abloh have produced works in which their respective styles and trademarks intersect in a stream of freewheeling, punkish mash-ups. In this exhibition, new iterations of the “TIMES NATURE” (2018) paintings include multimedia works such as “animated” and illuminated paintings, which play on cultural references, ideas of production and reproduction, and concepts of linear time. Two sculptures will be included in the exhibition: in “LIFE ITSELF” (2018), an oversize three-dimensional iteration of Murakami’s smiling flower motif sits in the open doorway of a greenhouse-like structure, expressively spray-painted in black; and in “OUR OUTER SPACE” (2018), Mr. DOB, one of Murakami’s many invented characters, emerges from Abloh’s signature four-point arrow logo. The two artists, kindred spirits from different sectors of a broader cultural zone, reflect incisively on the signs of the times in which we live, while working to disrupt the stratifications of cultural production.