MURAKAMI and ABLOH at Gagosian – Collaborative Works, « future history »

This Tuesday 20th February 2018, Gagosian along with Takashi Murakami and Virgil Abloh hosted a private view, T-Shirt screening and dinner at Gagosian Davies Street and Isabel in Mayfair to celebrate the opening of « future history ».

Names included Takashi Murakami, Virgil Abloh, Justin Timberlake, Liam Payne, ASAP Nast, Skinny, Michele Lamy, Derek Blasberg, Marc Ecko, Elisabeth Von Thurn Und Taxis, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Yana Peel, Peter Saville, Anna Blessmann, Roksanda Ilinic, Nicolas Kirkwood, Tania Fares, Sandra Choi, Jacquetta Wheeler, Polly Morgan, Mark Wadhwa, Alex Eagle, Simi and Haze Khadra, Sophia Hesketh, Whitney Bromberg Hawkings, Mark Guiducci

After arriving at Gagosian Davies Street to a private view of the art, guests walk to a secret location to get a special limited edition T-Shirt printed by both artists. This was followed by a sit down dinner and party at Isabel.

Exclusive to this exhibition : Limited-edition tee-shirt

OFF-WHITE by VIRGIL ABLOH AND TAKASHI MURAKAMI

Exhibition details
Murakami & Abloh at Gagosian Davies Street, London
« future history »
February 21 – April 7, 2018

Follow « future history » via
#TakashiMurakami #VirgilAbloh #MurakamiandAbloh #futurehistory #GagosianDaviesSt #Gagosian

« 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 art works that are shaped by societal observations – in a variety of media – which by their existence produce a new cultural impact. »
— Virgil Abloh

Coinciding with London Fashion Week 2018, Gagosian is pleased to present « future history, » collaborative works by Takashi Murakami and Virgil Abloh.
Working together in Murakami’s Tokyo studio, Murakami and Abloh have produced a unique series of works in which their styles and trademarks intersect in a stream of free-wheeling, punkish mash-ups. The two artists, kindred spirits from opposite axes of a broader cultural zone, reflect incisively on the signs of the times in which we live.

In his protean oeuvre that has captured the imagination of an entire generation, Murakami draws from sources as diverse as traditional Japanese painting, otaku subculture, Western art theory, Hollywood, and hip-hop. His expansive art production spills over into fashion, film, and commercial commodities, exploding the divisions of high art and pop culture.

Trained as an architect and engineer, Abloh works across fashion, architecture, performance, and consumer products, often deconstructing the creative process in public to challenge and analyze existing aesthetic systems and their distribution. The street-couture label Off-White, which he founded in 2013, combines traditional tailoring with more subversive references, dispensing with common conventions of fashion.

The duo’s ironic and insouciant artistic gestures are designed to disrupt the divisions and tiers of stratified cultural production. The sculpture Life itself (2018) is a kind of architectural carapace designed by Abloh to house one of Murakami’s brightly sinister flower sculptures. In another instance, Glance past the future (2018), they transform Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s 1623 self-portrait by superimposing Murakami’s character Mr. DOB to affect a graphic blur of pink and black, like a desecrated street poster leaving behind traces of an art-historical lineage.