JAPONISME → Cognitive Revolution: Learning from Hiroshige
TAKASHI MURAKAMI JAPONISME → Cognitive Revolution: Learning from Hiroshige, 2025, installation view Artwork © 2024–2025 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved Photo: Thomas Barratt Courtesy Gagosian
“In this exhibition I’m engaging in an artistic variety of backcrossing, the process by which one generation is made by crossing two different varieties, and in subsequent generations, one of the parent varieties is crossed back with the offspring.”
TAKASHI MURAKAMI Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo: Japonisme Reconsidered—Plum Garden, Kamata, 2024–25 Acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame 137 7/8 x 89 5/8 inches (350 x 227.5 cm) © 2024–2025 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved Photo: Kei Okano Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
NEW YORK,—Gagosian is pleased to announce JAPONISME → Cognitive Revolution: Learning from Hiroshige, an exhibition of new and recent works by Takashi Murakami at 522 West 21st Street, New York. Extending Murakami’s interest in the copy—a theme he also explored in Mononoke Kyoto at the Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art and Japanese Art History à la Takashi Murakami at Gagosian London (both 2024)—the exhibition juxtaposes the artist’s reworkings of prints by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) with those of paintings by artists identified with the nineteenth-century tendency known as Japonisme.
TAKASHI MURAKAMI Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo: Japonisme Reconsidered—Ichigaya Hachiman Shrine, 2024–25 Acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame 14 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches (36.8 x 23.9 cm) © 2024–2025 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved Photo: Kei Okano Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
On view are 121 canvases that Murakami produced in response to Hiroshige’s series of ukiyo-e prints 100 Famous Views of Edo (1856–58), which captures life in a city on the precipice of change. Murakami’s interpretations, to which he has added elements of other ukiyo-e works alongside his own characters, were first shown alongside the historical prints at the Brooklyn Museum in 2024 and prompt consideration of Hiroshige’s influential worldview.
TAKASHI MURAKAMI Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo: Japonisme Reconsidered—Asakusa Ricefields and Torinomachi Festival, 2024–25 Acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame 39 3/8 x 25 5/8 inches (100 x 65 cm) © 2024–2025 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved Photo: Kei Okano Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
Also featured are Murakami’s new reworkings of European Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings that were also inspired by Japanese originals in the context of Japonisme, a movement in European art and design sparked by the reopening of Japan to global trade in 1853. The term, likely coined by critic Philippe Burty in 1872, denotes an aesthetic rediscovery that profoundly affected modern painting. Many Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists were exposed to Japanese woodblock prints at the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle. Struck by the works’ combination of realist subject matter with pictorial flatness, asymmetrical composition, and brilliant color, they began to explore related styles in their own painting. As a Japanese artist, Murakami reclaims these images to bring the process of influence full circle.
TAKASHI MURAKAMI Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo: Japonisme Reconsidered—Kinryūzan Temple, Asakusa, 2024–25 Acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame 137 7/8 x 89 5/8 inches (350 x 227.5 cm) © 2024–2025 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved Photo: Kei Okano Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
Among the works that Murakami interprets—alongside those of Hiroshige, Katsushika Hokusai, Hishikawa Morofusa, and Kitagawa Utamaro—is James McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge (c. 1872–75). This image echoes the nocturnal subject and boldly cropped composition of Hiroshige’s Bamboo Yards, Kyobashi Bridge (1857); the flat color found in woodblock prints may also have prompted its restricted palette and simplified forms. Reportedly, Whistler discovered Japanese prints in a Chinese tearoom in London, an encounter whose cross- cultural essence encapsulates the initial emergence of Japonisme and its fascination to Murakami. Finally, several new paintings reflect on the origin of the French luxury fashion house Louis Vuitton’s logo in the traditional Japanese family crest or kamon, and its Damier (checkerboard) design in the Japanese Ichimatsu pattern.
TAKASHI MURAKAMI Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo: Japonisme Reconsidered—Suidō Bridge and Surugadai, 2024–25 Acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame 137 7/8 x 89 5/8 inches (350 x 227.5 cm) © 2024–2025 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved Photo: Kei Okano Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
An expanded version of Takashi Murakami: Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow, a major exhibition that originated at The Broad, Los Angeles, in 2022, is on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art from May 25 to September 7, 2025.
JAPONISME → Cognitive Revolution: Learning from Hiroshige is the latest exhibition by Takashi Murakami.. The exhibition opened on May 8 with an opening reception that was held from 6 to 8 pm. The exhibition will close on July 11, 2025, and is at the Gagosian, New York location at 522 West 21st Street, New York. For Takashi Murakami’s biographical information and exhibition history, please visit here. For more information about the artists represented by Gagosian and other exhibitions at the gallery, please visit the gallery’s site here. The gallery can also be found on Pinterest, X, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Artsy.For Takashi Murakami’s biographical information and exhibition history, please visit gagosian.com.
