Takashi Murakami

The most comprehensive retrospective to date of the work of internationally acclaimed Japanese artist Takashi Murakami will be presented at the Brooklyn Museum from April 5 through July 13, 2008.

The exhibition, MURAKAMI, will include more than ninety works in various media that span the artist's entire career, installed in more than 18,500 square feet of gallery space.

The exhibition was organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where it will be on view through February 11, 2008.

Born in Tokyo in 1962, Murakami is one of the most influential and acclaimed artists to have emerged from Asia in the late twentieth century, creating a wide-ranging body of work that consciously bridges fine art, design, animation, fashion, and popular culture.

He received a Ph.D. from the prestigious Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, where he was trained in the school of traditional Japanese painting known as Nihonga, a nineteenth-century mixture of Western and Eastern styles.

However, the prevailing popularity of anime (animation) and manga (comic books) directed his interest toward the art of animation because, as he has said, "it was more representative of modern day Japanese life." American popular culture in the form of animation, comics, and fashion are among the influences his work, which includes painting, sculpture, installation, and animation, as well as a wide range of collectibles, multiples, and