Art market analysis and Takashi Murakami’s exhibition at Moscow’s Garage Museum

The legendary Japanese artist Takashi Murakami inaugurated his retrospective at Moscow’s Garage Museum, a leading contemporary art institution in Moscow, founded in 2008 by Dasha Zhukova and Roman Abramovich. Murakami is famous for manga-, anime-inspired, crazy, nuclear, bright paintings, sculptures, installations and even a film.

“Under the Radiation Falls” is the last retrospective of Takashi Murakami and the first solo-show of one contemporary artist running at Moscow’s Garage Museum until February 4, 2018. The exhibition is a complete examination of Murakami’s art and Japanese culture. The museum states: “Consisting of five sections that each explore a particular phenomenon in Japanese culture which has been formally or semantically examined by Murakami, the show reveals the artist’s inquiries into the nuanced facets of Japanese culture and public consciousness, blurring the line between high and low culture while merging various media into one continuous flow of images”.

2017 is a good year for Murakami. The artist held 5 exhibitions worldwide (Moscow, Oslo, Chicago, Aomori, Texas) against only 2 last year. This worldwide institutional and cultural expansion must help him to sell because the sales of his works are not going up last 4 years. From 2014 to 2017 the artist’s works were sold for total amount about US$ 20 million, while from 2010 to 2013 – for total amount about US$ 57 million. As a result from this worldwide presence in 2017 he sold more that last year. Art dealers and gallerists, including Emmanuel Perrotin, support this promotion.

Anyway Moscow is happy to welcome such a bright artist.

Website https://garagemca.org/

Under the Radiation Falls exhibition view, Moscow, 2017

Photo: Alexey Narodizkiy and Ivan Erofeev