The Broad is an amazing museum space with an awesome collection, what caught my eye here was the vibrant colorful, whimsically intriguing mural pieces by Takashi Murakami .
The pieces varied from paintings of skulls with traditional animals that are often represented in traditional Asian art like yaks, or koi. There were geisha or people dressed in tradition kimonos; it was somewhere between a Japanese version of Alice in Wonderland meets day of the dead anime.
There were statues that seemed to step right out of the life sized murals and played around the room.
Takashi Murakami, museum bio states,
“Celebrated for his colorful, popular culture- inspired works, Takashi Murakami is best considered a history painter and sculptor capable of bringing seemingly divergent Japanese traditions into dialogue. Murakami studied Nihonga, a thousand-year old Japanese painting convention and technique, which he combines with meditations on contemporary Japan, known for it’s anime and culture of bright colors, toys, and cartoons. By employing various styles, Murakami finds and creates parallels between ancient Japan and today. Though vibrant and poppy the surfaces of Murakami’s works often mask a deep seriousness, which, for the artist is a metaphor for Japanese culture as a whole.
The 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, followed by the Fukushima nuclear disaster, marked a turning point in Murakami’s work. The successive cataclysms seemed to cry out for Japan’s history to come to bear for a suffering people and Buddhist traditions and folk tales, long and interest for the artist, found expression again in expansive new work that focused directly on the aftermath of the disaster."
Worth a visit.
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I've visited the Broad museum and absolutely love it! Personally, I felt that basically all the museum's exhibits were outstanding. The pop culture aspect of several of the exhibits will definitely interest the youth today. 