DOB (klien's Pot Series) 1997

This is Takashi Murakami's "DOB (klien's Pot Series)," painted with acrylic on canvas. It's a trip! This image is so cool. There's a really graphic quality with a limited palette of blue, red, and white against a pinkish ground, hard-edged and almost like cut-outs. It's weird! It’s as though Murakami started with a cartoon and then threw some abstraction at it. I imagine him in the studio, surrounded by his other pieces, pushing the boundaries of what pop art can be. What was he thinking when he put those eyeballs? The flat colors make you think about surface, about painting as object. The paint is smooth, thin, controlled. I see echoes of classic Pop Art, but twisted through a contemporary sensibility. Murakami's definitely in conversation with artists like Warhol but pushing towards his own hyper-colored, super-flat world.