Takashi Murakami Has Covered Practically Every Square Inch of a New Hong Kong Art Center With His Colorful Work

ARTNET NEWS

Takashi Murkamai at "Murakami versus Murakami" at Tai Kwun. Photograph: Alex Maeland.

Takashi Murakami‘s tripped-out universe has touched down in Hong Kong. The 57-year-old artist’s mix of fashion, graphic art, cosplay, and graffiti is spread across every crevice of the three floors of the new Tai Kwun Contemporary. The show, titled “Murakami versus Murakami,” leaves no small part of his career unexplored and no surface of the exhibition space untouched as it examines the different aspects of the Murakami brand. The show is on view through September 1 in the swank new institution, housed in a former Central Police Station complex, that was redesigned by Herzog & de Meuron at the cost of HK$3.8 billion. The center officially opened last May as non-collecting, non-profit organization modeled on Europe’s kunsthalles. [More]

This Black Gay Artist Unapologetically Makes Black, Gay Portraits

OUT MAGAZINE
By Trevel Anderson

“I really don't care about the white gaze at all,” Jarvis Boyland said.

There’s something different about Jarvis Boyland’s work. Walking the exhibition rooms of Los Angeles’ Kohn Gallery — where Boyland’s “On Hold:” exhibit is on view through Thursday, May 23 — I was arrested by his portraits of Black queer men. Though simple and straightforward, there’s a complexity in the color story, particularly in his subject’s skin tones. They were rich and nuanced and complex, both imagined and realistic, and unlike any paintings I’ve come into contact with. Three days later, I shared these observations with the artist-in-residence at University of Chicago over the phone. “I think Black flesh is so complex,” he said, “and it's so beautiful.” “Jarvis Boyland: On Hold:” is the Memphis native’s first solo exhibition and includes a suite of new paintings.[More]

ייִדישע קינסטלער אין דער הײַנטיקער רוסישער קונס

IN GEVEB By Henryk Berlewi

Marc Chagall, “To My Wife”

The issues that have emerged in the world of art over the last several decades have perhaps nowhere reached such a level of tension as in Russia. The new artistic ideas, which since the downfall of the so-called “Peredvizhniki” 1 1 have begun to migrate here from Western Europe, particularly France (with a considerable delay), have not only acclimated rapidly but continue to develop and expand. So it was with Cézannism, Cubism, Futurism and so on; with the entire breadth and depth of the Russian soul, these new artistic ideas, or artistic philosophies, were adopted and led to their final, logical consequences. That, which in the West was a product of harmless experimentalism, by virtue of its entirely free, non-obligatory, creative objective, has here in Russia effectively developed into a theory—a canon. [More]